I always find it interesting how people want to eliminate (or radically shorten) copyright for books, and forget that copyright also applies to software code (something they don’t want eliminated or shortened).
Without copyright law its not possible for the GPL to exist. Specifically the freedoms given by the GPL would be meaningless and all (currently GPL) code would be "public domin" and therefore could be used in closed-source projects.
So, absent the ability for the author to decide on the license, you are suggesting that, instead, you would require legislation forcing all software producers to release all source code for everything.
There is precisely zero chance of that being possible. Never mind the moneyed interests that would rail against it, never mind that it would need international ratification, it would have knock-on effects with regard to trade secrets and so on.
In reality, as much as OSS would hate to admit it, the revenues from closed-source are ultimately what drive the OSS movement. The failure of OSS to monetize at scale, the reliance on money from the likes of Google, Meta, Microsoft and so on, show the need for both a copyright system and the fact that some licenses generate more cash than others.
OSS and FS allow creators the -choice- of how to license their work, and by extension choose how their work is used. Suggesting that "there should be a law that all software is AGPL" (my interpretation of your suggestion) would meet strong resistance.
The FOSS movement predates all of those companies, and Microsoft was actively hostile toward it for a long time. GNU/Linux, BSD, GNOME, KDE, postgresql, etc. would still be here without them. Plenty of FOSS development could be done as a synergy with other products; e.g. Intel has a good history of this. With adequate consumer protection, all software could be this way (things like games could have copyright on the artistic assets. See e.g. id software). And in a world where all software is FOSS, it would still be a multi trillion dollar industry (perhaps with more of a professional services model) because software automation is simply too valuable not to be created.
Anyway, the point is that copyleft is a (well done) hack on the legal system. It's meant to be a practical solution while we advocate to fix the law. It's not an end in itself.
If they really preferred no copyright as an ideal, they would have created a free software license that imitates the no-copyright state as far as possible in the given system:
A license that does allow to distribute compiled code (executable binaries) without the necessity to provide the source code, but which also does not forbid any person to redistribute, modify, reverse-engineer, ... these binary files without having to ask for permission (with a virality in the latter conditions).
Perhaps such a license would also contain clauses that by using the software, you give any other user of this piece of software for any applicable software patent (to handle the situation regarding software patents, which is a topic separate from copyright, but still relevant to FOSS).
I am not aware of the existence of any such an open-source license.
(I also want to not require attribution, to require that other distributions and derivative works that have been published must also provide the same permissions to anyone else (even if the license is not included), that you are only sued for violation of this license if you sue or otherwise use legal methods (e.g. lawsuits, DMCA, etc) to stop someone from exercising their rights under this license, and that (for practical purposes) you may relicense any derivative work by GNU GPL 3 and GNU AGPL 3 (or later versions) if you have what you need in order to do it (in this case, source code and attribution are needed to relicense it in this way).)
Lacking copyright restrictions, I can take any AGPL code, compile it into my commercial product, and distribute only the binary.
In other words, lacking copyright restrictions, hinders the goal of Free Software, it doesnt enhance it.
* you must give source code (to the software users, not necessarily to anyone)
* receivers of software gain rights to modify it (because AGPL says so)
* receivers of software gain rights to further distribute it with or without modifications (because AGPL says so)
What happens in the previous scenario without copyright law:
* receivers of software can modify it (because copyright law doesn't prevent it)
* receivers of software can further distribute it (because copyright law doesn't prevent it)
Even more so the same happens automatically if you don't include AGPL code.
That's 2/3 things which copyleft code grants not being necessary because there is nothing preventing it. Sure not having the source code and having to reverse engineer things to modify them takes more effort. But large portion of software is closed source anyway, reality is that in many case GPL type licenses instead of increasing amount of open source software simply prevents its usage in the commercial software. The current trend with programming languages is going for higher level ones which are much easier to reverse engineer or require barely any reverse engineering. There are also plenty examples where copyright law get's used to prevent doing anything near the product containing closed source software not even directly modifying the software in situations where people are willing to spend the effort for creating new software or do the reverse engineering. Stuff like John Deer preventing repairs because you own the tractor but not the software. Cricut (vinyl cutter maker) preventing creation of third party desktop software for using their hardware because that would somehow violate copyrights of their firmware.
Preventing commercial software from using open source libraries isn't the goal of Free Software. It's a middle finger for copyright law doing the same in opposite direction.
The idea is that benefits of being able to freely modify and distribute any software might be might outweigh the few cases where software vendor decided instead of not using the GPL library to make their whole software open source.
We can only speculate how it would play out in long term. Would more commercial software be written using C++ instead of javascript and electron? Would more software be server side only? Would obfuscation be more widely used? Or would everyone accept that that's the norm, which wouldn't be that different from how things were in the early days of computers.
I don't doubt that if copyright was suddenly one day canceled companies would use every possibility to claw back privileges they had before. Once something is given it's hard to take away.
"Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
If there are no copyright restrictions, then all works, derivative or not, are freely available. Elimination copyright all together is the most extreme version of copyleft.
We don't forget at all. That's, like, half the shit we argue about.
Get rid of it. It'll make the world a better place, and those of us that write code will be able to get so much more done without having to worry about this stuff.
Under your suggestion I can take the GNU source code, add some stuff, fix some bugs, and release a binary-only version (presumably for money).
Under your suggestion, authors would have no control over their work at sell. Uou made z great text editor? Great, I'm using it in my proprietary closed-source IDE.
Under your suggestion there would be no balance. Without the stick of virility there can be no carrot of "publish our source code".
In the long run, the lack of copyright would hurt OSS since much of OSS is funded, directly or indirectly by commercial closed-source software.
I am both.
> Under your suggestion I can take the GNU source code, add some stuff, fix some bugs, and release a binary-only version (presumably for money).
Sure, but you can't copyright the binary either then.
In fact, get rid of intellectual property in general. It's kinda BS, since there's no natural scarcity.
> Under your suggestion, authors would have no control over their work at sell.
Correct. I think my previous sentence also covers this.