I’m a very much pro free software person and I used to think that GPL is basically the only possible option when it comes to benefits for free software (and not commercial use), but I’ve recently realised this question is actually much more ambiguous.
I think there are two sides to this issue:
- GPL forces all contributions to stay open-source which prevents commercialisation* of FOSS projects, but also causes possible interference of corporate software design philosophy and all kinds of commercial decisions, if contributions come from companies.
- MIT-like permissive licenses, on the other hand, easily allow for making proprietary forks, which, however, separates commercial work from the rest of the project, therefore making the project more likely to stay free both of corporate influence and in general.
So it boils down to the fact, that in my opinion what makes free software free is not only the way it’s distributed but also the whole philosophy behind it: centralisation vs. decentralisation, passive consumer vs. co-developper role of the user etc. And this is where things start to be a bit controversial.
What do you think?
*UPD: wrong word. I mean close-sourcing and turning into a profitable product instead of something that fulfils your needs
Was this done according to proper clean-room design principles? If so, then imo the GPL is still working as intended. The company had to spend a fuckton of money and time getting one engineer to read the source and describe what was done to other engineers, and then ensure that one engineer never ever worked on the project again.
If they didn’t do that then they violated the GPL and someone should report them to the SFLC.
I guess it depends on the goal the author has. If the goal is to let big companies pay their employees for contributions to open source, then it seems GPL3 is not the right license. Which is also the reason why Linux is licensed under GPL2 btw.
If the goal is to make companies avoid contributing and then copy it while claiming they did proper clean-room design (lets be honest, it happens all the time and rarely does anybody hear of it or bring it to court) … then yeah it works as intended.
the GPL v2 doesn’t have any less restrictions around strong copyleft (requiring that a company publish changes for components).
Maybe you’re thinking of the fact that GPL requirements don’t cross the kernel module syscall boundary?