Copyleft and community licenses are not without merit, but they are a dead end

DISCLAIMER: This comment was written incrementally and modified several times adding things that came to mind while writing.

About BSD,MIT,... vs CopyLeft. We can say what we want, but if we just stick to facts, MIT-alike licenses provide more freedom for the final user. If one would like to dig more I think that the canonical example would be the Linux kernel and asking questions about, what if it would be BSD licensed.

> They’re forcing a world view that everything should be free and shared like some sort of make-believe Star Trek future where money doesn’t exist.

Is a world where you are allowed to repair and modify your own house or car a "make-believe Star Trek future"? Asking to have insight and control over the software which plays an increasingly important role in our lives is not a fantasy to be dismissed.

> Ultimately, in my philosophy, copyleft represents real open source, despite what the OSI says. Copyleft is a restriction.

A typo? A restriction for you the creator perhaps, but for your users it represents the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute the software they use.

This strikes me as not quite right and a bit out of place for an essay that's otherwise pretty thoughtful. Copyleft is a niche or a branch, not a dead end.

There's a fundamental question facing anyone approaching the economics of a software project (and the economics of many other kinds of projects too): how much of the value of the project do you try to control/capture vs how much do you try to share in an effort to multiply the value? Source licensing questions are a subset of this: how much of the value of the project lies in certain levels of control of the source vs the prospect of a community around the source.

The copyleft licenses are one answer to the question: if the utility value of software developed by an active community around the source strictly exceeds the value of any one player controlling access to the source, control the source to maintain community property of contributions, but let anyone work out their answer to the value capture question via the utility of the software or their knowledge about it.

It isn't the only answer and I think it's fair to say that not every useful piece of software can be developed or maintained on that model, which is why I'd say it's an adaptation to a niche.

A niche is pretty different than a dead end, though.

This also addresses some odd conceptions of copyleft being incompatible with improving ones own lot or based in premature adoption of Star Trek values.

Now, in light of even more restrictive licensing options being adopted by prominent companies, "open core" seems awesome!

It feels like we take one step forward and two back. I'll just say, I wish these companies went full proprietary and stopped capitalizing on community participation while disdaining it at the same time.

Engulf, extend, devour.

0. Megacorps exploiting FOSS and not volunteering enough (a) money or (b) code back overall.

1. The limitations brought on everyone who's not a megacorp by authors trying to acheive 0a &| 0b.

As such, there are some difficult &| uncool ways around this:

i. A name-and-shame web app that everyone know about that impacts a company's sales and reputation if it cheats FOSS.

ii. Going micropayment commercial with intrusive license auditing to verify compliance.

iii. Begging harder from big companies that are known to abuse FOSS.

PS: Before OSS was popular, shareware/freeware with code hidden like it was some sort of arcane secret magic much as scientists did before the modern era.

That's FUD right out of 1998. Sigh.

Look, any attack on copyleft needs to start from a position of describing how any of the open source revolution of the last two decades happens without it. I mean, basically everything was driven by GPL software.

Instead, this starts from a position of poop flinging by calling GPL proponents naive communists. I don't see that it gets any better. Skip.

The problem with the "crusader" model, as practiced, is that it came with a "you're either with us, or you're against us" stance. This created a community subculture which encouraged the alienation of potential allies and served more to make the Free Software movement more of a hipster pose. It served more to make Free Software a kind of antipodean "unwalled" garden, where the barriers to entry also acted as a validation of the virtue signal.

Don't get me wrong. Copyleft licenses have a place. It's just that the place is not "Uber alles."

This is a bit of a tricky sentence, because it's clear that capitalism isn't simply the motivation to improve your lot in life, since this was around since before capitalism. The idea that "copyleft" ignores the desire to improve one's lot in life is silly. Much more often (though not even necessarily) it's individuals themselves who would rather give something to the world (and make sure it keeps giving to the world if it's something good) - and they choose a license accordingly. It's also strange to me that while it's less likely the most ardent capitalist supports the GPL or copyleft licenses, Richard Stallman is something of a little-L libertarian himself. In fact, he views software freedom as an important freedom like freedom of speech is, to be counted among the liberal ideas that the bourgeois (capitalist) revolution ushered in. Copyleft-as-freedom (in the sense that a freedom cannot be exercised to remove the freedom of others) is spiritually just as much of a 'capitalist' ideal as permissive licensing is, and the distinction can't be reduced down to the more modern dichotomy of positive and negative liberties, since even in terms of software, the content of the freedom can be framed in terms of either.

>The community licenses fall in exactly the same boat. They’re open, free to use and contribute to, as long as you follow the set of rules and restrictions. Whether they are open source is a boring semantic argument. If you claim they are not, then copyleft licenses aren’t either, unless you’re actually a crusader. If that’s you, I recommend having some whiskey ready for when the cruel realities of life come crashing down.

This is my main disagreement with the author. By brushing aside discussion of whether something is 'open source' as a mere semantic argument, he's of the idea that the principle can be abstracted away from the software. But in the case of open source software, I'm an essentialist; open source software is essentially open source, and in this Platonic sense is how I understand open source to be, just as an idealist might understand pears, apples and oranges to be part of something supersensibly real - fruit, not merely a mental idea.

The issue that people (like me) take with "community licenses" isn't that they have restrictions, it's that the restrictions are fundamentally at odds with what open source (or "free" or whatever other term you'd like to use for the essence of this software which would be well represented by a random aliquot of Github to be representative of the class). The author has tricked us - "open, free to use and contribute to" misses out a massive component of what we consider free software (including copyleft licenses) to be.

To me (YMMV) free software contains the hope for a better world, one which may be incompatible with this one. The talk of monetization and creating a 'business' around it has come about very naturally in the trend of commodification. Many people are (justifiably) upset because open source like houses or art now faces an internal contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, and it must do, in order to survive in a world dominated by capital, in which between 8 to 12 hours of our days are shifted towards those activities which produce exchange value away from those that don't.