Likewise if you want to commercially exploit some MIT-licensed software that I have modified and am selling binaries of, you are not more free to commercially exploit that than you would be under the GPL.
Copyleft doesn't "force" the "opening" of "source" on anyone. It's a pragmatic measure covering existing software in order to ensure recipients of that software are free to use it as they wish.
The GPL doesn't limit utility. You are confusing use value and exchange value. The GPL ensures that software retains its utility for its users.
All that said, if you want to give all your software to users under the MIT or Apache licenses knock yourself out.
I think the LGPL becomes something just like the GPL for scripting languages because there is no "linking" for many languages.
For example an npm package for nodejs can't be made into a "library" - all the source is "compiled" together at runtime.
MIT gives the freedom to make proprietary derivatives. If you excuse the emotive tone, this is a bit like "the freedom to enslave someone". A freedom to do something that impacts another person's freedom is something that we generally don't allow in free societies.
The GPL's purpose has always been to guarantee certain freedoms to end-users. If developers cannot restrict end-users freedoms (through proprietary forks) then that is a success, and is a net benefit to society (from the perspective of free software).
I get the SaaSS problem, and I think there are many other problems with it aside from licensing. But I don't agree that weaker licensing will solve it (nor do I really think that stronger licensing would solve it).
Otherwise the same argument applies: no harm becomes anyone due to a proprietary fork, it's copying, not theft. Why worry, let people live and work.
The obvious counter to the whole GPL idea is that it thinks the options are "build proprietary" or "build public" when in actuality, the options are often "build proprietary" or "build not at all", and so copyleft liscences leave end users less free to use tools, because the tools that might exist just don't.
I don't believe proprietary is literally slavery, it was just the most apt analogy I could come up with to show why "the freedom to take away others' freedom" is not seen as a freedom that needs to be protected in other circumstances.
I don't see how theft is a good analogy for the freedom to copy. Copying is actually anti-thetical to theft, because theft involves taking away something from someone -- copying something doesn't do that (except in perhaps in more general terms of economics, in some cases).
> no harm becomes anyone due to a proprietary fork, it's copying, not theft
No harm, until a user is given said software and doesn't have the freedom they'd have with the original version (but they need to use this version because it has certain features, or it's included in an OS which you cannot replace, and so on). I mean, at this point we're no longer talking about permissive licensing. Now we're just talking about straight-up proprietary software which may contain some MIT or BSD code.
> the options are often "build proprietary" or "build not at all", so copyleft liscences leave end users less free to use tools, because the tools that might exist just don't.
I don't think it makes sense to talk about theoretical tools that might have been written, and how users are not free to use things that don't exist. By this logic, any decision that theoretically might cause less software to exist in the world is against user freedom (and the existence of proprietary software is a good thing for user freedom) -- which is completely unrelated to an actual users experience with the software they do use, and undermines the point of user freedom.
You cannot make the argument that if GPL, software would be freer, because in practice the result might we'll be if GPL, less software period.
That's not a win for anyone.
Back to your first point, any right can be phrased positively or negatively. My rights to life and liberty prevent you from exercising your right to punch me in the face. Quite simply, any argument that reduces to "the freedom to take away others freedom is bad" can be ignored, because that applies to all freedoms. You must justify why the freedom you want to protect is more valuable than the freedom being reduced.
Specifically in this case, you are wanting to reduce my freedom to sell/provide proprietary software. By your thesis, this is apparently in and of itself a bad thing and so the GPL and other loscenses that restrict my freedoms should be abolished!
Now clearly you don't believe that, but you can't justify that by saying it reduces freedom, literally any restriction at any point in the chain reduces freedom. So why is end user freedom more valuable than library author freedom? Why is it okay for you to restrict my freedoms but not for me to restrict the freedoms of my users?
To get back to the copying analogy, you're saying that copying doesn't take anything away from anyone, but by forking and ignoring your liscence, what else am I doing but copying? If copying doesn't harm anyone, why should it matter?
How do you explain the prevalence of free software under the GPL for the past 30 years? If the GPL couldn't work, then we wouldn't be living in the world we have today.
As for whether it's "not a win for anyone" -- that's debatable. At worst you can argue it's a net neutral since you can't make a value judgement on software that doesn't exist -- sure, software that can cure cancer might not exist but neither does Skynet. But if all software was free, then you would be able to exercise computing freedom in all aspects of your life (and we have evidence that such freedom is a net positive -- just look at how many things just Linux has brought). Proprietary software has many practical negatives aside from the ethical debates we might have.
> My rights to life and liberty prevent you from exercising your right to punch me in the face.
Yes, I agree. You are restating that "the freedom to punch someone in the face violates their freedom to life and liberty" -- which is effectively what I said, and the freedom that should be restricted is obvious. You haven't made a distinction, and if you honestly think that the right to liberty is identical to the right to harm others then there's really no point in continuing a discussion on freedom -- it's clear that we completely disagree on what freedom is.
"Why can't I restrict the freedom of others" should be an incredibly obvious question to answer -- it does more harm to society than it does good, and that is how the validity of freedoms are decided. This is a concept that most children understand -- the golden rule.
> So why is end user freedom more valuable than library author freedom? Why is it okay for you to restrict my freedoms but not for me to restrict the freedoms of my users?
There are more users than there are developers. Developers can write their own software if they want, users have to depend on developers. The freedoms that users get are still incredibly useful to developers, the only restrictions on developers are "freedoms" that users cannot even attempt exercise.
There is a very strong argument of what is better for a society -- restrictions on fewer people so that a larger group of people have more freedom, or more freedem for fewer people so that a larger group have less freedom? Not to mention that even if everyone on earth was a developer, there is a practical matter of time -- as a developer in a proprietary-only world you would need to write all software from scratch if you wanted to modify it. So even developers massively benefit from this system.
Is the cost of the GPL worth being able to modify the Linux kernel and core system of any Linux distribution? Absolutely, it's a bargain -- you cannot pay Apple, Microsoft or IBM any amount of money to do the same aside from just buying the company (so economically you might argue that free software is worth the market cap of the company that develops said software).
> To get back to the copying analogy, you're saying that copying doesn't take anything away from anyone, but by forking and ignoring your liscence, what else am I doing but copying?
If you fork it and just use it yourself, nothing -- and I don't care (and neither does the GPL for that matter).
If you start sharing it with other people, then you are impacting other people's lives. To use your "punching in the face" analogy, copying it and playing with it yourself would be "the freedom to punch yourself in the face" versus "the freedom to punch others in the face". I really don't care if you punch yourself in the face, but I do care if you punch others in the face (using my work).
This isn't a good rule either. Enslaving all black people in the US would give a minority less freedom, but a majority more freedom (presumably anyway, given the economic potential). It's still horribly unethical. My point here is that you can't just make these sweeping generalizations about freedoms. Each freedom has to be compared with the ones it affects carefully. "My freedom makes more people freer" is not a sound argument. Why is that freedom better, and why is it better to society as a whole than the alternatives (and of course questions of whether or not utilitarianism is even a valid ethical system under which to analyze these problems).
>How do you explain the prevalence of free software under the GPL for the past 30 years? If the GPL couldn't work, then we wouldn't be living in the world we have today.
The question is not "would GPL software still exist under the GPL" its "would non-GPL software exist under the GPL". It's not "GPL can't work for anything" but "can GPL work for all of the things that are currently Apache/MIT/BSD"? And would those things (and all of their derivatives exist under the GPL?)
Because then you are making a value judgement on software that does exist. Would your chromium (and v8 and node) or your llvm or your apache anything (spark, hadoop, beam, etc. which are used in all kinds of proprietary work) be as successful if companies couldn't keep their proprietary bits proprietary?
The opportunity cost of the GPL is, potentially, things like those. You're discounting them because "we can't know the value of software that doesn't exist" or whatever nonsense, but we know of a lot of non-GPL OSS, and its extraordinarily valuable.
So the biggest question is: would the increase in end user freedom be worth the loss of all currently nonfree software? If not, what percentage of a loss is "acceptable"? Would losing LLVM but not Chromium be acceptable? If Apache never existed, would that be Ok as long as all of Google's open source work was GPL'd instead? Would the world be a better place if it was exactly the same except that all machine learning work was proprietary?
None of those sound like wins, and the ability to use Chromium or Tensorflow or Beam or LLVM all sound like net increases in freedom to me. And net improvements to the average person's life.
Licenses like MIT give the most possible freedom, particularly with how derivative works are commercialized. Copyleft licenses limit the freedoms of derivative works by forcing them to be copyleft (although with some hacks and exceptions). This limitation means that options for creating a derivative commercial product from copyleft sources are very limited.
If you are able to get around the copyleft restriction (like SaaS products developed on GPL and AGPL'd software) then you are able to build a commercial product. But if you want to ship that software to a customer in a licensed product or a piece of hardware, you won't be able to do it without exposing your entire source code to be copyleft.
I've heard people argue that copyleft is better because it forces this opening of source on everyone. It's a utopian ideal that I think limits its utility, particularly with regard to derivative works.