> > all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking
I don't see how your argument is relevant to that, or how it disputes the article. The article is not about funding or "organic growth". It's about survival characteristics and winning the mainstream. Blink, WebKit, and Gecko are all a mixture of permissive and weak copyleft licenses. There are no popular GPL browser engines. There are no popular proprietary browser engines. That's exactly the outcome that the article predicts! (Of course, it doesn't need to "predict" the most popular browser engines specifically. In 2015, they already looked similar and had a similar moat).
Although I have to admit now, we'd probably see proprietary browser engines if it wasn't for the "weak copyleft" part. Now I think that it's actually the most long-term competitive license type for some projects!
If we continue with the topic of web browsers, then we'll see a seemingly strong counter-example: the most popular browsers are proprietary, and have been for a long time. But that's a thin layer on top of a larger open foundation. A thin layer is easy to replicate and compete against. Thus, Chromium and Firefox shells are maintained (and kept competitive) just fine. They are less popular than Chrome or Edge, but not because they are less maintained or broadly inferior (they may be for specific tasks). They are long-term viable options that aren't going away.
> Firefox is controlled opposition, paid $400 million per year by Google. They would have died long ago if it weren't for that little detail.
Depends on how you define "died". Broadly, I disagree. Too many developers are interested in the existence of Firefox. According to an Igalia employee [1], during the first half of 2024, 10.71% of contributions to mozilla-central came from Igalia, and another 8.74% came from Red Hat. I wanted to see an aggregate share of Mozilla employees (which must be even less than the remaining 80%), but I couldn't find that.
But anyway, even if Firefox died, that wouldn't be related to its license (and this article) at all. Chromium and WebKit have similar licenses.
> But my argument is, if you find them, they're mostly GPL.
That may be true if you artificially limit yourself to non-corporate-driven projects. But that's not what the article is about. And that distinction is irrelevant to me, too. If the "official" corporate-driven fork turns into something that I dislike, I have the freedom to switch to a community-maintanied fork (for popular projects, usually there is one) or fork the project myself. Or, I put up with the non-ideal corporate project if it's still the most attractive option. Being community-driven isn't a guarantee that the project will always be maintained and that the maintainers will always agree with you and put your use cases and needs above others.