Linux

Most Open Source software is written by corporations. The Open Source licenses are an advantage to them.

The biggest source of GPL software is probably Red Hat (IBM). They maintain most of what people think of when they think of GNU software and they wrote many of the newer GPL projects that everybody uses (like systemd).

The trend has been towards permissive licenses for a long time. The have led to more Open Source software, not less.

Look at Clang vs GCC. Clang attracts a greater diversity of corporate contribution and generates greater Open Source diversity. Zig and Rust appeared on LLVM for a reason.

What we should be worried about is the cloud. It allows big companies to outsell the little companies writing Open Source software. Neither permissive nor copyleft licenses prevent this.

One side community wants total GPL take over and one side they don't support total GPLv3 licenced Operating system like

https://codeberg.org/Ironclad/Gloire

https://ironclad-os.org/

https://ghostkernel.org/

I gotta say I'm a bit concerned about this whole corporate takeover thing goin on in FOSS land. If companies start slapdin' MIT or Apache licenses on GPL software that's supposed to be all about freedom and whatnot, it does seem like a bit of a cop-out and it could have some pretty serious consequences for the community.

Let's see how this goes then revisit the question.

Given the current world we live in I do not want anything that I create or contribute to itself contributed to an exploitative corporation's bottom line (at best) without my consent or their assuredly begrudging reciprocation. This should not be controversial. The GPL accomplishes this. Nothing more lax or permissive does or will. You are not a cool or chill guy because you don't care what someone does with the code you write. You are handing all of those who would sack you the keys to the castle, ushering them inside. That is not abstaining, it's letting your opponents win. No thanks.

The switch to permissive licensing is terrible for end-user software freedom given that corporations like Apple and Sony have leeched off of FreeBSD in the past to make their proprietary locked-down OSes that took over the market. Not sure what would happen if RedoxOS became usable in production, but if it turns out to function better than Linux enough to motivate corporations to shift their focus to it, open source versions for servers would probably still exist, but hardware compatibility on end-user devices would be at higher risk than before as vendors switch their support and stop open sourcing stuff. Or they keep focusing on Linux for server stuff due to the GPL license and the fact that their infrastructure is already on it.

GPL is the only thing standing between us and Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.

There’s a reason that “Stallman was right” is a meme in the FOSS world.

Do you think IBM wouldn’t make Red Hat completely proprietary if they had the chance? They already tried to use their customer licensing to restrict source access!

It only takes one successful proprietary product to gain mind-share and market-share and become a new de-facto standard, and then all of the original FOSS has to play catch-up and stay compatible to stay relevant.

See Jabber/XMPP for an example.

I'm going to continue releasing my software with a license that I deem appropriate.

For things I'm building only for myself or that I have no interest in building a community around, I couldn't give a shit what people do with it or if they contribute back. My efforts have nothing to do with them. I'm releasing it for the remote chance someone finds it useful, either commercially or personally. Partially because I've benefited from others doing the same thing.

I'm not anti-copyleft, but the only time I actually care to use something like the GPL is for projects that would be obviously beneficial to have community contributions. Things that require more effort than I can put in, or that needs diverse points of views.

I use permissive licenses not because I'm a pushover, but because I really don't care what you do with it.

That's good point.

Another thing that is dangerous are CLAs or "contributor license agreements", like Google uses. Technically, it is GPL, but Google might demand to hold all the copyright, so as the copyright holder it can change the license at a whim.

A little bit.

A lot of the Rust remakes are being made by morons who have no problem using weak licenses that favor corporations.

We should hold them accountable and avoid using/contributing to their projects until they switch to a free license.

like the GPL successfully enforces

I'm not aware of the GPL being legally tested to where you can claim that; there are a lot of open questions, and it has failed to protect works from AI companies, for example.

To quote Brian Lunduke, because the GPL is viral and functioning systems licensed under the GPL have been published, if a future Rust-based MIT version of Linux ever comes out, we can just "Fork it, then we'll have our own Linux."

Coreutils has little commercial value to take can create a proprietary fork of. There is little value that can be added to it to make it worthwhile. The same is for sudo - which has had a permissive licence from the start. In all that time no one has cared enough to fork it for profit.

Not saying that is true of every project. But at the same time even GPL software has issues with large companies profiting off it and not contributing back. Since unless you are distributing binaries the GPL does not force you to do anything really. See mongodb and their move to even more restrictive licences.

The GPL is not the only thing that stops companies from taking open software. Nor does it fully protect against that.

Not does everything need to be GPL. It makes sense for some projects and less sense for others. Especially libraries as that basically forces no company from using them for anything. Which is also not what you want from a library.

How does permissive licensing lead to corporate takeover? Companies can do proprietary forks of permissively licensed foss projects, but they can't automatically take over the upstream.