Linux Foundation quietly drops community representation
mjg59.dreamwidth.org
mjg59.dreamwidth.org
I, for one, am ready to drop my membership and stop supporting the foundation. Not that they care. A single platinum sponsor is worth 5,000 individual "supporters" to them, but it's a matter of principle -- it's a withdrawal of endorsement.
What options do we have to give the community a voice as far as Linux governance goes?
I think the consequences much more dire than 'just' losing a community voice, when you take VMWare and AllWinner into account.
The Linux Foundation is basically a funnel for multiple cooperations to collectively pay the pay checks of some important kernel developers. In other words, some major kernel developers are now indirectly working for companies that make proprietary forks of Linux.
If anything, it gives a lot of legitimacy to the actions of AllWinner and VMWare to the outside world.
How would moving to a non-GPL alternative possibly be a rational response for community members who wanted to elect someone who would fight for the GPL in court?
I don't think it's quite like that
And after all this time and all the warnings they've received, it's not possible they're not aware of their obligations; they just choose to ignore it until the day someone actually sues them.
please ...
Of course, mjg59 is a pretty loudly outspoken feminist activist, so I guess he's hardly going to object to all that.
And nobody really believed that increasing the amount of paid-for outreach-positions is a bad thing.
I have no opinion on this particular case, but why doesn't a cash-flow problem count as a financial mismanagement problem?
That being said, if the problem is that she would be a bad representative, the appropriate solution is for someone better to run against her and win the election. Eliminating the position suggests that the Linux Foundation doesn't trust the community to pick the "right" representative... and that says a lot about the situation.
The idea that the linux community is dysfunctional and would elect a representative who wanted to push a particular political agenda at the expense of linux itself is sadly none too implausible.
1. Deny individual representation
2. ???
3. Governance problems fixed!
a plan (yeah, I'm being snarky, sorry).
That is why the sociopaths and busybodies "rise" to the top of any org, because those that started it all don't want to get involved in that (and will likely just pack up and move on if push comes to shove).
> The by-laws were amended to drop the clause that permitted individual members to elect any directors
An “ad hominem” argument against the would-be representative doesn't sound like an appropriate response to that …
For an in-depth argument from a Gnome board member on why this is a completely false accusation, see here: http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/2015/09/13/outrageous-outreach/
(To be clear, I don't think their liabilities were ever in danger of exceeding their assets, but you can't pay wages and bills with a promise from Google to pay you money at some unspecified point in the future once it winds through their accounting process. I believe there was even some risk that they might not have enough money for the admin expenses involved in invoicing companies for OPW and chasing them up. Cashflow is never some minor accounting detail - screwing it up kills companies.)
No, that doesn't seem to be the same. The mailing list explicitly states what the rebuttal claims as well: They were bad at collecting money for a time.
The mailing list _doesn't_ state that the director was in any way responsible. Your words were "the former Gnome Foundation executive director who caused them to run out of money". The reponse to your post linked to a statement that claimed that this isn't true and your link doesn't support that argument either.
I'd say that this ("She is the reason/she caused the foundation to run out of money", directly implying a personal responsibility) is a very big difference between these two stories. You might be correct - I wouldn't know. But again: I wouldn't consider these two statements (exactly or even remotely) the same.
They weren't just bad at collecting money either - if I'm understanding their announcements and FAQ correctly, the OPW came with contractual deadlines for Gnome to pay participants but no similar deadlines for sponsors to pay Gnome, which is why they had to prioritize OPW payments over everything else.
I'll note further that pejorative comments about "feminists" seems to be something of a "beat" of yours. Maybe you should lay off it for awhile.
I am completely ignorant of this situation, but it is clear that the source you provided doesn't dispute the allegations but instead provides further support that the allegations are true.
The outreach program was so successful that the company went out of business!
And it was the accounting department's fault! Not the person in charge! (anyone care for a game of office politics?)
Honestly, the allegation came across as absurd in the original post, but your post makes me think that the story might actually be true.
Trying to spin the whole story as "it's those damn feminists again!!" is quite annoying.
Edit: Ah, looks like it probably didn't make the news because the President of the SFC didn't want to comment on it and the details were murky: https://lwn.net/Articles/665855/
We also know that the LF has at least VMWare and AllWinner in its ranks, and perhaps other companies with a vested interest in declawing the GPL. That, at least, seems to me like a conflict of interest.
At least one person associated to LF has publicly denied that LF is punishing SFC, but I remain skeptical:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/41x5ec/linux_foundat...
He was basically pitching kdbus on behalf on the automobile industry a year or two back, because they wanted a drop in replacement for QNX and its in-kernel RPC.
And you will find some "lovely" mailing list duels between him and Landley about documenting the interface between kernel and udev, as Landley was trying to develop a minimal udev replacement.
A single individual is rarely ever the reason an entire organization runs out of money or implements bad policy. Others must sign on and implement and sign off and not object.
Let's not have personal attacks on character; let's keep the thread focused on the issue. To direct attacks on an individual's character in order to make one's argument borders on bigotry and almost always qualifies as a bad argument.
The problem here is simply put; piss poor financial management.
I'm not disputing GNOME had (has?) a problem - I'm not following anyway - or Garrett having an agenda (I mean come on, the LF never gave the community a voice, and the community never cared), but there seems to be no reason to accuse Sandler of mismanaging funds.
Rob Landley sums it up well: http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#18-07-2010
and the pointy-hair still doesn't get it
and now they're taking over...
time for a fork (yeah I wish it was that simple)
"Dear <name redacted>,
The Linux Foundation canceled your automatic payments. This means we'll no longer automatically draw money from your account to pay the merchant.
If you have any questions, you may ask The Linux Foundation about this cancellation."
I got it too.
"The IT Chamber of Commerce", however, isn't a misleading name.
But I'm curious about your statement about the wikimedia foundation, is their board not elected by general members?
As late as a month ago, it claimed to be: "SAN FRANCISCO, December 17, 2015 -The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source..." (from the Block-chain page linked above, http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2015... )
Fun fact: The NFL was a 501(c)(6) organization at one point because "professional football leagues" were specifically named in the IRS code but they voluntarily dropped their status.
Steve Westmorelander - He received his B.S in computer science from Louisiana Tech University. Westmoreland is based in Portland, Ore.
Dan Cauchy - Dan earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering (with a Computer Engineering major)
Dan Kohn - Dan received a bachelor's degree in Economics and Computer Science from the Honors program of Swarthmore College
And all the fellows:
Linus Greg Kroah-Hartman Till Kamppeter Richard Purdie Janina Sajka
Weird question, don't see why the management have to be coders. They work for the foundation. The foundations pay plenty of the kernel developers.
> Weird question, don't see why the management have to be coders.
Would Apple have been as successful if Jobs wasn't deep into technology and design? What about Gates? When your organization provides code, shouldn't the strategic leadership have a rich and up-to-date understanding of code in general and your organization's code in particular?
All that being said, I don't know the above at all. As far as I know, they're all world class developers, but I haven't seen any evidence toward that end yet.
Do you mean directly? How many do they pay?
That appears to be a big part of the business model of LF.
I used to perceive LF to be the equivalent of centralized funding for linux kernel developers. I recognize now that is not correct. The reason I asked is because, if I perceived it that way, there's others who would have perceived it that way and donated to the cause for that reason or supported it for that reason (eg: paying for attending LF organized conferences). If say 10% of the foundation's budget goes towards management costs, and 90% goes to developers, then Yay!. If it is 90% management, 10% developers, then that's why I asked.
Why am I not suprised?
No, when it part of underhanded dealings by large multi-national corporations. So Linux has finally arrived! Sorry to see it was the Linux Foundation, I've always had high hopes for them.
0) Linux is just a kernel, so if taken literally, it never will be an OS. But I will roll with your terminology for now.
1) Linux was a Unix-like OS for tinkerers, programmers and soon for servers. A "real OS" is not defined by its availability on the Desktop. And indeed I very much used it exactly because of this, because I am a tinkerer who rather runs a Server OS on his private machines, that also allows him to do most Desktop-tasks with ease.
2) The voice of the Desktop camp inside of Linux is not ignored, if anything, the influence is too big. Think about systemd for example. This was not a move in order to run better on Servers, this was primarily Notebook and Server focused. The year of the Linux Desktop is not something we won't see because of evil big corporations, rather because it simply is not Linux's DNA to be that.
(And side note: Because of systemd I see more and more people using *BSDs)
Do you perhaps mean something else here? Notebook and Desktop focused maybe?
Systemd is useful on servers, especially for the DevOps people. On a desktop, it solves no problem that cannot be -- and that has not been for years -- solved without it.
I don't use it enough to question its technical merits. The fact that it was packaged in Debian and the world hasn't fallen over implies that people may be unhappy with it, but can still do their jobs, which would mean it's not that bad. But the necessity of its existence on notebooks and desktops is questionable at best.
Edit: I know this is going to incite a lot of posts about how the times have changed and now storage devices aren't statical anymore and we NEED systemd. From a lot of people who are too young (or too recent Linux users) to remember the days when udev was still news.
Guys, we've been easily hotplugging devices on Linux, on USB, SATA and PCI for about half a decade before systemd's first release (and not as easily but reliably, nonetheless, for at least seven or eight). We've been reliably booting and using Linux off a combination of USB and NFS filesystems for even more than that. All that yadda yadda about devices coming and going at boottime is not without its technical merits, but unless you boot your computer with its case open while frantically plugging and unplugging SATA drives, trust me, it's of absolutely no consequence.
Devices appearing and disappearing dynamically used to be a problem. In 2.4. Do you remember the 2.4 kernel? That was (boy, does time pass...) more than ten years ago. Do you honestly think the smart people writing Linux sat on their thumbs for ten years while the arcane world of tape drives and 10 MB hard drives around them was giving way to this new world of magic SSDs and USB?
The conspiracy theory would be that it's a deliberate RedHat effort to cripple competitors like Solaris. Unfortunately \*BSD and freedom will be caught in the crossfire.
Systemd is just the end result of RedHat employing a dominant share of infrastructure-critical Linux developers and making too much money compared to other players.
This fork seems to have put RH on a war path, as their subsequent releases no longer separated out kernel patches from the main kernel source etc.
And now CentOS is part of the RH flock, where before it was an independent repack of RHEL.
And while Solaris itself may be "dead", there are still various tech that came out of its development that is of interest in the -nix world.
Just look at the continued lamentations that you can't get ZFS support in Linux because of incompatible licenses.
I can understand RedHat being pissed about that.
A lot of people seem to think that portability is just a way of being nice to people who use obsolete devices. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, the simple act of isolating platform-dependent (whether "platform" means software or hardware) operations behind an uniform interface makes software more future-proof, makes the code better organized, and forces you to think about the problem until it's clearer in your own head.
I've seen a lot of software that was not meant to be portable, 'cause hey, we're only going to use it on <this CPU> running <this OS> and doing <these things>. Ten years down the line, no one is buying machines with <that cpu>, <that OS> hasn't been supported in half a decade and you have ten new customers that want different things, so <these things> are now <these 1000 things that we never thought about>. The software is now full of various small hacks and quirks and a compatibility layer has been bolted on top of a hundred thousand lines of code that make fifty small assumptions about the underlying platform.
As for conspiracies... I don't think there's an evil masterplan behind anything, but I'm hesitant to be happy about a big company playing an important role in a critical piece of unportable infrastructure. A lot of people jump on the "it works and I don't care about other platforms" bandwagon. Suuure, they'll say, systemd is Linux-specific, but there are good reasons for that, they use Linux-specific things so that they can be as well-integrated as possible and give the most flexibility to their users.
Win-win, right? Linux users win a better platform, systemd developers don't need to be worried about platforms their users don't care about.
Except "systemd developers" is Red Hat, a bunch of really young people who hope to work for Red Hat one day, and a community of people who have been writing SysV scripts for so long that they'll give a kidney for anything that will put a nail in that crap's coffin. It's basically Red Hat and a few people that the PR machine calls "community", but make no mistake about it, when the people who do it for fun go have fun somewhere else, Red Hat is still going to be the main engine behind it.
"Platforms their users don't care about" is -- by no mere coincidence -- Red Hat's competition. In this context, lack of portability is just a glorious term for vendor lock-in. Your infrastructure depends on systemd? Great, I hope you like Linux, 'cause you won't be moving it to something else any time soon.
Oh, but the options are open, you'll move to CentOS, you say? Right -- for now, that's an option, because the Linux enterprise market is still, by and large, up for grabs, and there are very few Linux companies that are large enough that Fortune 500-class companies can talk to. If Red Hat goes evil now, they'll just go out of business. Wait for ten more years, until it supports enough projects that are too vital to fail, before you tie yourself to their platform.
Remember all the fun we had with SMB and Kerberos a long, long time ago? Just because they have fluffy penguins doesn't mean they won't go Microsoft on our asses.
Even if you don't care about software quality (which is a bad idea but I've seen enough people who think that "it's good" means "it makes money for the people selling it"), portability is great, it's a free ticket to say you know what guys, fuck you, fuck your shit platform, fuck your shit licensing schemes and especially fuck every single one of you fuckers, I'm switching to <this>. FREE TICKET! All you have to do is talk to your sysadmin team and utter the words if they think it's a good idea.
You need not be.
One of the lirc maintainers a few months ago moved all Debian support out from the main source tree (http://sourceforge.net/p/lirc/git/ci/44696400eb92de342444665...) and this month proposed dropping its System 5 rc scripts (which is what Debian still packages up and uses for running lirc even in "unstable" and "testing", incidentally) and providing only systemd service and socket units.
The issue of Debian kFreeBSD came up. As an exercise, I took the FreeBSD binaries for lirc, which I built from the FreeBSD port, ran the service and socket units through the conversion utilities in the nosh toolset, and (after selecting "ideal" mode and fixing a bug) the converted services successfully supervised the FreeBSD binary under the nosh service manager. This was on actual FreeBSD: on PC-BSD version 10.2, specifically. Even in a world where its maintainers provided only systemd ancillaries, lircd could be run on FreeBSD.
The bug was in the lircd units themselves that the lirc maintainers were wanting to switch to, ironically. lircd is putting stuff in an ephemeral runtime directory /var/run/lirc , without either making the directory itself or declaring it with a RuntimeDirectory=lirc directive in the systemd service units. I simply added RuntimeDirectory=lirc .
Lots of other posts about LF, the license issues, other companies doing similar things, etc. Not sure how or why this sub-thread got taken so far off topic. Are we, at the start of 2016 still so sensitive about Linux that a 10 word setup sentence starts a frenzy and draws me a reprimand on "flame-bait?" In that case I'm sorry, I'll be much more careful in the future to not write posts that assume the reader will make it past the first dozen words.
Linus always said: He cares about the code back and otherwise not what vendors do with it. He is not in any sense one of those GNU-people about Software Freedom everywhere and for all. When the Free Software Foundation (FSF) created the GPLv3, indeed during the process, Linus already spoke out against it and said he would never ever use it[1]. He cited reasonable use-cases for which vendors have no other way than to not to give open access to devices, in part for example commercial license agreements.
The GPLv3 - from the perspective of the FSF - fixes some vital flaws in GPLv2, from Linus' perspective however is just too strict, forbids use-cases Linux has been used before previously and is extremely anti-business and would hurt the Linux project.
Whether this step of the Linux foundation is right or not, can't say for sure, but I totally understand it. A political anti-business pro-freedom-everywhere radical who already is involved in suing some of the companies she is supposed to work with on that said board? Sounds like a headache you would want to avoid at all costs.
He can crow all he likes about how he wishes he never used the GPL and how he is not political... but the truth is, no one knows what would have happened if he didn't use the GNU license or distribute GNU software. Its theoretically possible that his project would have died on the vine without members of the community who cared about those things and made considerable contributions. Nobody knows, not even Linus.
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul2. This has nothing to do with Linus, and from what I can tell, parent did not deserve it either.
Linus hasn't made a fortune off Linux. He could have, but he didn't.
2. To clarify, I wasn't referring to Linus
I'm not sure how you can think that when GNU, which is the operating system for just about every single server running Linux, was started by RMS.
So saying "GNU ... is the operating system for just about every single server running Linux" does not make sense.
Android is the most widely used OS on the planet, and it became so faster than anyone expected. What advantage do closed-source vendors actually derive from a fetish for secrecy? Do their customers believe they've got some secret advantage? Does anyone believe Windows has some secret sauce in it that makes it better than other OSs?
Much of the software industry today sustains itself on indirect revenue. Even Microsoft admits it must pivot to ecosystem revenue and away from unit licensing revenue.
(Although the egcc split was painful, and at long last there are some viable alternatives - it took decades for them to rise up. So it's a little odd that the FSF/RMS would never have successfully been able to develop a project? Obviously the need for a (new) GPL licensed [kernel] is less when there exists a decent GPL licensed kernel (Linux)).
A few years ago I had expected LLVM to have caught up to GCC by now, but I hadn't anticipated the accelerated pace of GCC improvements. I don't know if the competition from LLVM had anything to do with this, but GCC is showing no signs of slowing down.
The majority of FOSS users are actually people that don't want to pay for software and never give anything back to the community.
That's two pretty bold (perhaps even inflammatory) statements.
[Perhaps contigent on a) the number of users of commmercial software that either do not pay, or do pay, but do not want to pay - and b) the definition of "giving back to the community" (Is paying for a Windows license "giving back to the community"?) and to wich extent most users of (any-license) software ever give anything back to the community.]
Also how the majority of everyone that I know, that isn't a technical user, deals with FOSS. They don't care if it is pirated or FOSS, just that they didn't pay for it.
Why do you think there is hardly any money to be done for desktop FOSS software, which usually isn't subjected to trainings or consulting fees?
Without the GPL and GNU, Linux would not have the same brand. The GPL is part of Linux's public image and a public image is what drives usage.
Torvalds seems to like v2 and not v3[1]. I can't find a source of him saying he wishes he hadn't used the GPL at all - do you have one? It seems that v2 does exactly what he wants - get code back.
[1] "I still think version 2 is a great license": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU - in fact, in this talk, he says v3 is fine as a license (though not for his needs), but his problems with it were the way that the FSF was trying to submarine it into all existing v2 licenses, and misleading people about how it worked.
Wikipedia [1] has this quote:
> Torvalds has described licensing Linux under the GPL as the "best thing I ever did."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Licensing_terms
[1] http://www.informationweek.com/the-torvalds-transcript-why-i...?
(I have another words to say about the GNU/Linux ideology, but I think that's close to irrelevant here.)
In the commercial license world it would be like starting an organisation of companies which repackage windows with new features and sell it, never acknowledging or paying MS.
There's debatable right or wrong and understanding or not, but what some of those companies do is just violation of law and supporting illegal activities. That is what GPL violators do.
VMWare: https://lwn.net/Articles/635290/
"Allwinner is joining the Linux Foundation to support Linux and to improve what we see as two important open source software development capabilities: collaboration and compliance" http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2015...
Allwinner GPL violations: https://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations
Other ones - just google big sponsors of LF + gpl violation, there are a few.
"Allwinner is joining the Linux Foundation to support Linux and to improve what we see as two important open source software development capabilities: collaboration and compliance," said Jack Lee, Chief Marketing Officer, Allwinner Technology. "These two concepts are critical yet difficult to master for new Linux community entrants like ourselves."
Is the Linux Foundation "supporting" Allwinner? Or is, as I suspect, Allwinner paying them dues?
How can they have a member organisation which plainly goes against the goals of the foundation? And yes, even by statements like the one published on joining, it's supporting Allwinner by giving them recognition.
Both? The accusation being made is that Allwinner are bribing them to ignore GPL non-compliance.
Edit: Source https://grsecurity.net/announce.php
Just to note: the Linux kernel is explicitly[1] licensed under GPLv2 (without the the "or later" clause). This makes GP even more offtopic.
1. http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...
Sarcasm aside, you're presenting an argument against the GPL and the FSF. I might even agree, but that seems irrelevant to a more specific question of corporate governance of the Linux Foundation.
You're talking about avoiding headaches, but if you want to represent a diverse group of stakeholders, you're going to have some headaches. If the current role of the Linux Foundation is purely to be a voice for large enterprises who wish to exploit Linux, then why did this change? Is it a good change? What organisation does represent the interests of Linux stakeholders?
I mean, keep in mind, the core policy difference is whether or not the Linux Foundation supports following the license of Linux. That's the reason (as far as anyone can tell) that Sandler is disliked and the at large board seats were removed. Can you imagine the BSA working to keep a lawyer who sued software pirates off their board? The very idea is absurd.
Second, it hardly seems "anti-business" to require everyone (businesses included) to comply with the license agreements of the software they use.
And third, the entire issue of enforcement only came up in this context because of this remarkably coincidental timing for LF to decide that it no longer wants community representation. It's sad that the best-case scenario is "just" that this change occurred for entirely unrelated reasons, despite the timing; I'd certainly hope that was the reason, rather than the much scummier possibility of changing the rules with one specific candidate in mind, out of fear that they might get elected.
I'm old enough to remember when following license agreements was pro-business. Has anyone told the BSA yet?
I presume you don't mean the Birmingham Small Arms Company
A relic of the days when Microsoft was powerful and evil, Apple was for hippies, and clouds were things in the sky. Seemed kind of scary back then though. :)
Wikipedia has some juicy details (cash bounties, hounding third world countries, etc): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance)
In any case, I don't understand how "pro-freedom-everywhere" is in any sense a slur.
I imagine they were called "irrational" when they started the FOSS movement and created the licenses and other tools that are part of it. Yet look what they built and what has been built on top of it. Now it's cool for people who benefit enormously from it, including Linus Torvalds, to disparage it. It's all lefty, hippy 'idealism' after all - if you ignore the enormous practical results.
What foundation are we building for the next generation of engineers and tinkerers? Spying and tracking systems? Closed proprietary silos (like smartphones and web applications)? HTTP/2 and systemd - which may be technically great, but don't provide that same freedom-to-tinker for future hackers.
I'm not saying the trade-off is bad or good, but there is a cost; it's not free.
Also, people don't seem to complain about the cost of HTTP over SSL in these discussions on HTTP/2. I've never understood that. If you're allowing for TLS, why not HTTP/2?
ASCII has a much lower barrier to entry. By the same reasoning, everything is 1's and 0's so everything is the same - just use better tools.
> If you're already using a tool
Often, I'm not.
> illusion of readability
That depends entirely on the protocol design; some are better than others. Binary protocol can also be a mess. More importantly, binary protocols will always require external definitions, while some text protocols do not.
> bug-ridden and rife with security holes
Changing from readable tokens and ASCIIified intege4rs to packed binary doesn't magically fix bus or security holes.
> what do I need to do for compatibility
That's easy: use the robustness principle[1].
(and most RFC-based protocols say you should send a CRLF).
A possible argument against this could...
> how long could this line be
...also be an argument against length fields. If you want reliable parsing - a very good idea - a good argument[2] can be made to only use context-free protocols (i.e. use parser-combinators).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
[2] https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4763-en-the_science_of_insecurit...
Meredith covers this specific issue at 33:25 in her 28c3 talk I referenced ([2]). "Be definite in what you accept" can emulate traditional "liberal" parsers if the compatibility is strictly defined in the grammar.
I really should have phrased that better; the robustness principle is great historically, and is therefor necessary in many current protocols, but newer protocols should be using well-defined either regular grammars or deterministic context-free grammars. As Meredith and Sergey explain in that talk, moving away form Turing complete protocols would prevent an important class of exploits.
They don't, and the readability is a feature.
I'm not sure how you conflate XML and JSON as synonymous to "protocol" and also requiring tools to filter, but than imply that a "good tag/length/value" format would somehow be superior to the former.
Because, well except for readability and ease of debug, that you lose completely by going binary, and message size that improves by going binary, I can't find any other difference.
An honest question: Is it possible that they suck for you and people like you, skilled, experienced engineers with sophisticated tools, and with much less time than money - but they don't suck for less experienced, less equipped, hackers or tinkerers with time to try things but little money or expertise?
Remember that those people built quite a few things, from Facebook to Napster to Dell to the web browser to the web itself (just off the top of my head). Empowering them is arguably the key to innovation.
I can see why anti-corporate licenses are big win for users. PS4 and Macs use BSD kernel. The whole PS4 is locked up and it totally blocks users from doing anything else, though Sony built it from the components they took from community (BSD, LLVM etc.), they don't have to give it back.
On the other hand, I am still waiting for a distro based on Apple's OSS.
Linux, GCC, KDE, Qt, GNOME, Java are GPL (or at least LGPL) and there lies the innovation by masses, we see them running on so much variety of form factors. IMHO they need polish and marketing, but at the end of the day my work gets done and I am very much happy with it.
As a contributor I am sure if I work on OSS, no company should take it, make a product selling like hotcakes (PS4, Macs, iPhone) and then refuse to open it, lock down the devices and not even be obliged publish the modifications.
GPL rocks!