it is a wish. if someone says "please don't wear shoes in my home" i hope you would honor their very simple and understandable personal wish without setting up a contract for it?
i mean, just be a bit more human, please.
Stallman would prefer I not use any closed source software to read his blog, including OS, drivers, web browser, etc.
People routinely ignore unreasonable requests. Asking me to not wear shoes in your home is reasonable. Asking me not to give a copy to Joe after telling me I can give a copy to whomever I want is unreasonable.
We already established no one is forcing you and if you don't respect the author you don't get to be respected for your decision to ignore them and will earn snarky remarks. (and rightfully so, in my opinion)
This is a repetition of your claim, not an argument for it. Counterpoint: It's entirely reasonable to ask you not to give a copy to Joe.
(1) Though I don't know if this has been actually tested in court - courts in India have more freedom to broadly interpret social contracts like the GPL, unlike the US courts, and a positive outcome in favour of upholding the license even in such cases could be possible).
I disagree here. The idea, intent, philosophy is one (crucial) thing, the resulting practical artefact (here the license) is another. It works exactly as it was designed to work.
People/companies modifying GPL software for their own use (internal or external) without redistributing the software itself (so without requirement to redistribute the code) existed before SAAS grew on, only at the time, the small scale of this made it a bargain that was "interesting" only depending on one's capacity/hubris to maintain an internal fork on their own.
*aaS hugely tipped the scale, and the side effects, but the mechanics are the same.
And yes, that may not have been the original intent, and the AGPL is as valid a license as a reaction to provide a new tool more in line with the original intent, but that doesn't make the use of the existing GPL all within what it actually enables anyone to, invalid or unethical.
(but maybe only in a specific perspective of the framework of the original intent)
I respect developers right to put any restrictions on the code they share with the world. But I believe it should either be explicit or not restricted at all. Either write the license that says exactly what you want or otherwise don’t shame people into the desired behavior.
Edit: one could even add a more generic statement to the license stating that it’s forbidden to share the code on any platform that would use it to train their AIs per their ToS, so you don’t need to single out GitHub and potentially others in the future.