Hacker News Reader

Comment by caramelcustard | Hacker News Reader

"Surveillance capitalism is winning over the free software..." software that "just works" and offers the latest and the greatest features does, not "surveillance capitalism" or "open source developers".

"They have failed in their mission to stop all this closed-source software from spreading." except that was never the mission, the mission was to provide an alternative to complex licensing as well as simplify the improvement and development of things "everyone needs" both law-wise and code-wise.

The only mission that could be considered to be "failed" (depending on who you ask) is licensing.

View on HN

On that front, thanks to anti-GPL folks, we are back into Shareware and Public Domain, although under different names.

I don't think that it's solely the fault of anti-GPL people. GPL proclaims freedom but then demands you to limit your freedom when it comes to anything of your own that just happens to include GPL licensed elements. At that point, proprietary solutions whose providers couldn't care less as long as you pay your fee don't seem that bad in comparison to, say, a competitor who's going to exploit the GPL freedoms to gain an advantage. I mean, considering that the topic is about Microsoft (in a way), don't forget about the existence of the "Source available" license, though IMO the best license is always going to be the one that fits the product rather than ideology (and GPL puts the product in the background).

Public Domain is a great way of releasing intellectual property for everyone to use.

Trying to use GPL software makes you a target with angry techies constantly accusing you of not publishing complete diffs of changes needed to ship features. GPL fanatics are the most to blame for putting negative pressure on GPL. That is why Macs have wget instead of curl. GPL does not necessarily mean poison, but that is what it has become.

"That is why Macs have wget instead of curl." I got curious and decided to look that up. Did you mean to say "curl instead of wget"? "GPL does not necessarily mean poison, but that is what it has become." don't remember where i heard it first, but "with each iteration, GPL becomes less and less about freedom".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com