this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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it's been a trend for a while unfortunately. getting rid of the gpl is the motivation behind e.g. companies sponsoring clang/llvm so hard right now. there are also the developers that think permissive licenses are "freer" bc freedom is doing whatever you want /s. they're ideologically motivated to ditch the gpl so they'll support the change even if there's no benefit for them, financial or otherwise.
And there it is. Follow the money.
They are maliciously harming the community. They need to be named and shamed. I still seethe at OpenBSD using it. Why is it so hard for them to understand? Why do they want to give away their work for the taking to corporations who just want to make money off of their backs?
they have a different view on what freedom means
Then it's not one that is actively helping the FOSS community
How is actually writing and contributing free software not “actively helping the FOSS community”?
Not using GPL or derivatives doesn't force companies to publish changes (which are usually improvements) which harms the community
Some people might say that so many companies contributing free and open code to clang/llvm instead of GCC is real world evidence against the idea that companies only contribute to free software because the GPL makes them. Or even that permissive licenses can lead to greater corporate sharing than the GPL does. Why does Apple openly contribute to LLVM but refuse to ship GPL3 anything?
According to the web, Red Hat is the most evil company in Open Source. They are also the biggest contributor to Xorg and Wayland. Those are MIT licensed. Why don’t they just keep all their code to themselves? The license would allow it after all. Why did they license systemd as GPL? They did not have to.
The memory allocator used in my distro was written by Microsoft. I have not paid them a dime and I enjoy “the 4 freedoms” with the code they gave me because it is completely free software. Guess what license it uses?
you (and everyone else who thinks the gpl is just about contributing back) are missing the point. the main goal of the gpl licenses (including the lgpl) is user freedom. they ensure that you can modify any piece of gpl software anywhere it's used. if you use a propietary system that includes gpl/lgpl software, you should be able to modify the gpl parts to do whatever you want. say for some reason you're using a system that includes ai slop in its shell, but the shell is a gpl application. you could just grab a fork of the shell stripped of ai functionality and replace the system's shell with it
that's impossible with permissive licenses. with permissive licenses, you could be using a system with 80% open source software and be completely unaware of it, unable to change it as you see fit. from the pov of the user, "permissive" licenses are restrictive; copyleft licenses are freer bc its restrictions are there to forbid the developer from locking down free software for the users
of course companies are going to prefer permissive licenses. they want to take advantage of using free labor enable by open source while keeping the freedom to lock down said open source software in their systems. so, when given the option, they will always prefer to contribute back to software with permissive licenses
and that's the whole problem here: you giving them the option by creating a copyfree alternative to an important piece of copyleft software. do you think companies would ever comtribute to linux if any bsd was a viable alternative to linux? but the kernel community at large decided to stick to the gpl, so the companies have no choice
it's true that copyfree software isn't any less free than copyleft software, and i'm not even completely against using permissive licenses. my issue is creating an mit alternative to gpl software
Is it? As I understand it, LLVM is much easier to work with than GCC, especially given their LLVM IR and passes frameworks.
sure, but it didn't get much attention until gcc switched to gpl v3 from gpl v2 and apple decided to jump ship to it
my point is that competitors to gpl software are always advertised through their technical merits (valid or not), but the point behind their development is getting rid of gpl-licensed software