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Comment by exo762 | Hacker News Reader

> The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.

Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.

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Allow me to disagree. GPL was a great idealistic dream that led to less-restrictive open-source licences such as MIT/BSD which have been the greatest catalyst towards the establishment of tech corpo giants and the software ecosystem we have today.

GPL gave us Linux, but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft. GPL is why 90+% of libraries on Github are MIT licensed. GPL gave us OpenAI and Anthropic and this here article.

>GPL was a great idealistic dream that led to less-restrictive open-source licences such as MIT

The less restrictive ~1984 MIT early version of the software license was several years before ~1989 GPL v1.

> but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft.

The major fault I see here is that people didn't forsee that the default GPL should have had AGPL's clauses.

It's failed in that most software doesn't use it. Because of the psyop, people who would be very sad if Amazon stole their software are licensing it MIT so Amazon can legally steal it.

For many years GNAT Community Edition has used GPL, including its library. That greatly boosted Ada programming language domination over planet and is a good reference for everyone else to also choose GPL for everything if they struggle at dominating. Tears of joy when programmers got to know that standard library in GNAT CE was licensed under GPL.

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