I believe the GPL is Stallman's most lasting accomplishment and IMHO it's doing just fine. It allows all kinds of projects, big and small, to flourish like hardy organisms even in 2022.
Stallman and the FSF help encourage and motivate its use.
Stallman and the FSF help encourage and motivate its use.
There are obviously some successes, but in general GPL license is not popular - overwhelming majority of the software is not released under GPL and sometimes never released to the public.
Apache and commercial no-cost is not the same. If the vendor decides to cut support for a piece of software and introduce something new, bloated and costs more. I have the choice to hire a programmer to maintain the current thing with GPL and Apache if it is worth it. That is a very important benefit, I have the choice, many business owners do not understand that, but the IT people they hire do and can use that to protect their employer (and their jobs) from exploitative practices. The GPL ensures it stays that way years down the road while Apache suffers from the MIT issue Stallman had when he maintained a Lisp system on his own. His competitor took his MIT licensed code and did not give back.
Those 'no-cost' licenses often become cost and very-costly in the future if they become popular enough with future versions.
As for the software products: they are still very common. Look at Flatpak or Snap stores. Krita made quite a bit of money on the Microsoft store believe it or not. Paid for and free Linux distro products dominate the server market that run Linux and GPL userland tools. Some Apache licensed web components (Grafana) is moved over to the AGPL.
They are the same in the sense that they are both not GPL. They just illustrate the spectrum of licenses that are not ideologically aligned with FSF, but may still do the job.
> As for the software products: they are still very common.
I will just repeat myself: there are some successes, but this is not the majority of the software. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s enormous pile of proprietary software, that is absolutely not free or open source. Think of Google, Facebook or Salesforce codebase. Think of all the banking or military software. Even some Linux distro can be dwarfed by those applications.