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

[Jean Louis]

* Pen-Yuan Hsing <penyuanhsing@gmail.com> [2020-09-28 05:29]:
> > Their wordings for the MIT license is:
> > 
> > The MIT License is short and to the point. It lets people do almost
> > anything they want with your project, like making and distributing
> > closed source versions.
> > 
> > Their wording is not quite nice, as making and distributing closed
> > source or binary versions is allowed with GPL, what is not allowed is
> > disallowing the user to receive the source code.
> 
> I agree the wording can be made more precise. And the short and to the
> point... lets people do almost anything they want with your project implies
> that this is the easiest set-and-forget license to choose. For those who
> only think about open source as a development method and/or haven't thought
> deeply about software freedom, it is easy to choose the MIT license by
> default.

People have different opinion, so from their viewpoint, they do know
that such software may be converted to proprietary software and they
are fine with it.

What is important is that there is free software.

> As discussed elsewhere such as in Aaron Wolf's response, it would be good
> for us to communicate the social benefits of copyleft and encourage its
> adoption. Doing so *does not* have to make permissive licenses or its
> advocates enemies. I see it more as introducing an even better solution
> (i.e. copyleft license) to friends of free software.

The true enemy is proprietary software. And if we think
idealistically, then the copyleft shall be pushed so long and so far,
until all software beocomes free software, and then it will be end of
the licensing war. That would mean that all the laws on this planet
would demand that software is free software and then it would be end
of licensing, there would be no need any more for the GNU GPL.

That is why I say that sharing software freely in countries like in
East Africa, be it proprietary or free software, is a legal situation
where one cannot enforce anything, so any license plays no role
anymore.  practically, as anybody can do almost anything. It would
become similar in the imaginary society where all software is free
software, there would be no need for any licenses any more.