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Comment by zxzax | Hacker News Reader

According to the actual text of the GPL, that is not the spirit of it at all. Sorry to disappoint but this is a common misconception that I see. The word "community" appears zero times in the GPL. The community aspect might be a side effect that happens in some cases with it, but trying to use a license of some kind of panacea to maintain a community doesn't make any sense. That's not how communities work. It's the people who maintain your community, not the license.

Edit: The lack of enforcement of GPL is a different story, but you can trace that directly back to the very same community, including the FSF, who seem to have decided years ago that enforcing the GPL is not worth it anymore for some reason.

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Have you read Stallman’s essays on the topic? If you’re interested in this stuff, he goes very in depth on the goals of the free software movement: https://www.gnu.org/doc/fsfs3-hardcover.pdf The GPL was created explicitly to advance those goals.

From Wikipedia’s summary of the essays:

    The author proposes Free software licenses (mostly GPL) as a solution to social issues created by proprietary software and described in essays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software,_Free_Society

I am familiar with the various other things that are hosted on the GNU website. I'm referring to the actual authoritative legal text that gets copied alongside all the source code that you use, not any other essays on the subject. That text poses a different story than those essays. I'm also not sure why this is being brought up now, as the GP post you made acknowledged that the GPL was not even accomplishing that goal.

Edit: Since the license itself is vague on what those "social issues" actually are aside from sharing and changing the program, in my experience projects will tend to use it for whatever they feel like. Sometimes this is aimed towards community building but often isn't. To me the community building aspect mostly happens outside of these legal decisions, for example: closed source programs can have a community too, sometimes that community might even be hosted in the same places such as github.

> I am familiar with the various other things that are hosted on the GNU website. I'm referring to the actual authoritative legal text that gets copied alongside all the source code that you use, not any other essays on the subject.

you know that in case of actual litigation, judges will not only look at the actual text, but also at the intent surrounding it, right ?

Sure, but the "intent" in question would be the intent of the copyright holder that chose to use the GPL. My point is that the intent in a lot of cases is NOT to do what is being suggested.

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