It seems to me that the website is taking the position of explaining free software from first principles, rather than as this branch or strain of open source that you already have to understand to really get. I think that's a good thing.
Just give it sometime and you'll see many examples of that in this very thread. Everytime the topic of opensource license comes up, there will surely be a comment that conflates "source available" with "opensource" or even worse insist that "source available" also qualifies to be "opensource". It is like words don't mean anything anymore. It is like apple is apple and pear is also apple because it looks round and we can eat it. stops ranting. Coming back to this post, I think it is valuable to explain opensource from first principles like this.
There have been a spate of startup products that advertise themselves as "open source" to capitalize on the marketing/SEO advantages of doing so. And when called out on this in comments or whatever, the founder eventually presents some kind of argument along the lines of, "well if anyone can read the code then it is open!" or even the old "language can evolve" canard that people trot out when they want the meaning of a commonly-understood word or phrase inverted to fit their specific business or political agenda.
Attach the same adjective to "park" or "road," and you'll understand my frustration with people claiming dominion over the word, "open." You don't have an obligation to cut the grass or fill a pot hole.
If you want people to understand what you mean, use more specific language like, "copy-left." That was a fabrication of the open source movement and doesn't clash with commonly understood language. If they don't already understand the jargon, at least it will be obvious, and they can seek out the definition.
No, I don't care what some open source foundation defines it as. I don't recognize their authority to extend the definition of the word, "open."
But copyleft already means something different from open source. It's more like what people unfamiliar with open source software think that open source software is.
We wouldn’t have our modern BSDs if it weren’t for people being frustrated with source-available Unix. BSD initially started out as essentially a collection of additions to AT&T Unix. Eventually after the divestiture of AT&T and the resulting dramatic price hikes for Unix source licenses, the Berkeley developers embarked on a campaign to replace AT&T source code to develop a fully open source Unix. They beat GNU to the punch (see GNU Hurd), only to be stymied by lawsuits from AT&T.
Ultimately copyleft is mostly a bureaucratic exercise, and it ends up stifling collaboration in all but the most hostile environments (such as the one Linux faced in its early days).
Today, many companies basically ban GPL-licensed or otherwise copyleft software projects, perhaps apart from a handpicked list of exceptions, because they don't want to deal with the hassle. MIT, fine, GPL, no. And that's pretty sad. Because it means that if write a new project you need to choose between "people will use it but it won't be copyleft" and "copyleft but a sizeable part of the community won't touch it with a 10ft pole".
(I won't start discussing the merits of copyleft itself, if that's what your "why do you care?" question was aiming at.)
At the same time, there are shining examples of commercially used and developed copyleft software like Linux, Blender, OBS-Studio. I doubt there exist many companies that banned really all GPL-licensed software, including Linux.
This shows that the GPL itself is not necessarily a hinderance to commercial use or development. In the end many hardware vendors accepted the GPL as a fact of doing business and opened their drivers to add them to the Linux kernel. With NVidia being the most prominent counter example.
Exactly, it is a hack that weaponizes the very system of software copyright against iself. Companies want the power to restrict everyone except license payers to use their software? Fine, then we can restrict their right to restrict our rights.
I think any criticism of copyleft should also contain the exact same criticism od copyright itself. Especially since it's copyright that started stifling collaboration in the first place... Originally, all software was "free software", since the concept of software copyright didn't even exist.
Take it from a graybeard, this is absolutely not true. "Software copyright" has always been a thing, from day 1. Early on, it didn't really affect things too much, but most software was under copyright.
What exactly do you mean by "day 1"? First algorithm written? First computer program written? First program shared between machines? I remember reading Richard Stallman's story about software sharing, and him explicitly saying how software was initially free "by default", and how it was companies that invented software copyright, which is the spirit my original comment was intended in.
I am not familiar with exact history of US software copyright, so if you have any hard info about that, I'd be happy to read it, and correct any of my future statements on the topic.
But, looking back on the earliest times that I was involved with computers -- which predates microcomputers entirely -- all of the software that came with the machines was copyrighted, as evidenced by the copious amount of copyright notices all over everything.
> Richard Stallman's story about software sharing, and him explicitly saying how software was initially free "by default", and how it was companies that invented software copyright, which is the spirit my original comment was intended in.
Taken literally, Richard Stallman is simply wrong here. But I doubt that he meant that all software was free of copyright (simply because it wasn't). In the US, before 1978(?), you had to register your copyright and it was legally possible to intentionally not copyright works. Lots of software did that, so there was certainly software that wasn't under copyright. I suspect that's what Stallman was talking about. The need to file to obtain copyright protection does mean that copyright didn't apply "by default" then. But that's not saying that there wasn't copyrighted software!
There's no such thing as "software copyright", by the way. It's just "copyright", and software doesn't have any sort of special status now, nor did it then.
As to hard info regarding the history of US copyright, there's tons of it available online. You could do worse than reading the various histories and issues the government has at www.copyright.gov.
The way I see it, there are two positions on software, both valid:
1. You want to develop a piece of software for your own sake, and potentially sell it to others. You copyright it and keep it proprietary.
2. You want to develop a piece of software in collaboration with other people. You apply an open source license to it.
My point about copyleft adding unnecessary bureaucracy to collaboration only applies to case 2. In case 1, you don't want that collaboration, and the copyright system helps you achieve that.
I should also note that if the copyright system didn't exist, most software would still not respect the 4 freedoms. Code would still be kept secret by companies (and employees would be contractually prevented from leaking it), and they would still impose hardware + software restrictions on which software you could install on hardware they sell. Even worse, they could actually do this with Linux or GNU utils as well.
The GPL isn't hacking the copyright system against itself, to "disable it" for software. It's hacking the copyright system to extend protections that would not be possible in a world without copyright.
And if it weren't for software copyright, we wouldn't need that protection at all!
In a software-copyright-less world, reverse engineering wouldn't be a copyright violation, so the scenarios you mention would be very unlikely to happen.
Not to mention, with so much software moving to SaaS models, access to even the binaries to be able to do reverse engineer them is going to be extremely hard.
Also, embedded devices using GNU utils and Linux would have no reason to allow any access to the code running on them in a world without copyright.
So you're saying I can reverse engineer Windows software, and use the results in my own product, without Microsoft raining hell on me?
Wow, those ReactOS guys are really dumb with their clean-room reimplementation then! Someone send them a fax!
I switched back largely because of the popular confusion about what "open source" actually is, and also because modern open source advocates have come to think that "open source" means that there's an overt collaboration aspect to it. In my projects, there is not. So it's easier to avoid the mess and just go with copyleft.
I think you are just talking about a situation where someone forks an open source code into a private one. But the original author still has the code. If someone steals my house but I get to keep my copy… nobody has lost anything.
I don’t think analogies to physical objects work all that well for software.
Moreover, but in my own opinion, nowadays free software is more about the obligation to share the modifications. I gather that many know what open source is, but that obligation, is crucially important and embodies the political statement of the FSF. It's what puts free software truly apart (and makes it great, IMHO). So I'd move the copyleft explanation higher in the list, closer to the 4 freedoms.