Ultimately copyleft is mostly a bureaucratic exercise, and it ends up stifling collaboration in all but the most hostile environments (such as the one Linux faced in its early days).
Today, many companies basically ban GPL-licensed or otherwise copyleft software projects, perhaps apart from a handpicked list of exceptions, because they don't want to deal with the hassle. MIT, fine, GPL, no. And that's pretty sad. Because it means that if write a new project you need to choose between "people will use it but it won't be copyleft" and "copyleft but a sizeable part of the community won't touch it with a 10ft pole".
At the same time, there are shining examples of commercially used and developed copyleft software like Linux, Blender, OBS-Studio. I doubt there exist many companies that banned really all GPL-licensed software, including Linux.
This shows that the GPL itself is not necessarily a hinderance to commercial use or development. In the end many hardware vendors accepted the GPL as a fact of doing business and opened their drivers to add them to the Linux kernel. With NVidia being the most prominent counter example.
(I won't start discussing the merits of copyleft itself, if that's what your "why do you care?" question was aiming at.)
Exactly, it is a hack that weaponizes the very system of software copyright against iself. Companies want the power to restrict everyone except license payers to use their software? Fine, then we can restrict their right to restrict our rights.
I think any criticism of copyleft should also contain the exact same criticism od copyright itself. Especially since it's copyright that started stifling collaboration in the first place... Originally, all software was "free software", since the concept of software copyright didn't even exist.
The way I see it, there are two positions on software, both valid:
1. You want to develop a piece of software for your own sake, and potentially sell it to others. You copyright it and keep it proprietary.
2. You want to develop a piece of software in collaboration with other people. You apply an open source license to it.
My point about copyleft adding unnecessary bureaucracy to collaboration only applies to case 2. In case 1, you don't want that collaboration, and the copyright system helps you achieve that.
I should also note that if the copyright system didn't exist, most software would still not respect the 4 freedoms. Code would still be kept secret by companies (and employees would be contractually prevented from leaking it), and they would still impose hardware + software restrictions on which software you could install on hardware they sell. Even worse, they could actually do this with Linux or GNU utils as well.
The GPL isn't hacking the copyright system against itself, to "disable it" for software. It's hacking the copyright system to extend protections that would not be possible in a world without copyright.
And if it weren't for software copyright, we wouldn't need that protection at all!
In a software-copyright-less world, reverse engineering wouldn't be a copyright violation, so the scenarios you mention would be very unlikely to happen.
Not to mention, with so much software moving to SaaS models, access to even the binaries to be able to do reverse engineer them is going to be extremely hard.
Also, embedded devices using GNU utils and Linux would have no reason to allow any access to the code running on them in a world without copyright.
So you're saying I can reverse engineer Windows software, and use the results in my own product, without Microsoft raining hell on me?
Wow, those ReactOS guys are really dumb with their clean-room reimplementation then! Someone send them a fax!
Take it from a graybeard, this is absolutely not true. "Software copyright" has always been a thing, from day 1. Early on, it didn't really affect things too much, but most software was under copyright.
What exactly do you mean by "day 1"? First algorithm written? First computer program written? First program shared between machines? I remember reading Richard Stallman's story about software sharing, and him explicitly saying how software was initially free "by default", and how it was companies that invented software copyright, which is the spirit my original comment was intended in.
I am not familiar with exact history of US software copyright, so if you have any hard info about that, I'd be happy to read it, and correct any of my future statements on the topic.
But, looking back on the earliest times that I was involved with computers -- which predates microcomputers entirely -- all of the software that came with the machines was copyrighted, as evidenced by the copious amount of copyright notices all over everything.
> Richard Stallman's story about software sharing, and him explicitly saying how software was initially free "by default", and how it was companies that invented software copyright, which is the spirit my original comment was intended in.
Taken literally, Richard Stallman is simply wrong here. But I doubt that he meant that all software was free of copyright (simply because it wasn't). In the US, before 1978(?), you had to register your copyright and it was legally possible to intentionally not copyright works. Lots of software did that, so there was certainly software that wasn't under copyright. I suspect that's what Stallman was talking about. The need to file to obtain copyright protection does mean that copyright didn't apply "by default" then. But that's not saying that there wasn't copyrighted software!
There's no such thing as "software copyright", by the way. It's just "copyright", and software doesn't have any sort of special status now, nor did it then.
As to hard info regarding the history of US copyright, there's tons of it available online. You could do worse than reading the various histories and issues the government has at www.copyright.gov.
I switched back largely because of the popular confusion about what "open source" actually is, and also because modern open source advocates have come to think that "open source" means that there's an overt collaboration aspect to it. In my projects, there is not. So it's easier to avoid the mess and just go with copyleft.