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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the point of GPL to be cancer?

The point of the GPL is to bind to the cancerous cells of copyright and neutralize them.

My understanding of the position taken by GPL authors is that the current implementation of copyright in the US favors publishers heavily to the detriment of users [1], that this is unjust [2], and that users deserve certain freedoms [3]. It's not about restricting developers, it's about removing restrictions that shouldn't have been imposed on users in the first place. If public domain is one end of the spectrum, see [4] for the other end.

EDIT: formatting

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...

[3] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...

[4] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

How is copyright cancerous? Copyright doesn't infect other works afaik. But GPL clearly does.

In the US, copyright infects every work at conception. No one but the author has much of a right to do anything with a work without a license. The GPL is a license - it's a subset of big C Copyright. Without Copyright the GPL is unenforceable. The GPL can't infect anything that isn't infected with the notion of Copyright.

Every license, other than completely opting out of copyright and into the public domain, infects the derived work with some sort of terms. You'll see in a lot of proprietary licenses "No reverse engineering, etc." The GPL forbids you from forbidding anything except forbidding.

EDIT: nuance, "much of a right to do anything" should more specifically be "anything involving distributing to other people." There exist exemptions in copyright law for using copyrighted works for your own personal use. Giving that thing to other people is no longer personal use.

Not if it's in your interest.

For big corporations looks like it is cancer.

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