Re: The sad decline of copyleft software licenses? :(

[Ali Reza Hayati]

> If a permissive license is used to create proprietary software, then
> it is just to teach users about free software and freedom.

Well for those who already know about software freedom, yes. But there
are people who have never heard of software libre therefore there's
nothing to be learned from a proprietary software for them.

It's our responsibility, as the community, to teach them about software
freedom and one way is to publish our software under a strong license
such as GNU GPL.

> Yes, that is then not any more free software, it becomes proprietary.

Yes. It becomes proprietary and proprietary software is harmful as it
doesn't respect userfreedom.


> That is alright, as that software is still free, so it can be used in
> GNU and other free systems as free version of such software.

Yes. The original one is still free but that's not the case. We believe
all software should be free. It can be used in many projects (such as
GNU) so does software licensed under GNU GPL.

What we're talking about is not whether they are free or not, it's
whether they remain free or not. Many become proprietary or be used in a
proprietary platform against software libre community.

> Instead of saying that permissive licenses harm users, it is better to
> say that proprietary software harms users.

I don't say permissive licenses harm users, I'm saying they "can" be
harmful as they can be used to produce proprietary stuff and therefore
violating users' rights.

Of course proprietary software are harmful (in general concept); one way
to fight against them is to stop helping them build proprietary software
upon our software by publishing our software under a strong
legally-checked/valuable license such as GPLv3.

-- 
Ali Reza Hayati / alirezahayati.com
PGP: 6ACD 8BF4 4109 E852 96B7 2F20 6118 CCE2 1080 D0E2

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature