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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • To be honest I expected nothing else from the Linux kernel as by now it’s so widespread and essential to so many companies’ operations that they need to have their dedicated developers to make patches and push new features into the kernel. The notable fact though is that Linux is licensed under GPL and somehow the companies still embraced it, so it’s not as “toxic” to them as expected. I am aware of the fact that Linux and most other popular GPL projects are mostly contained to binaries and there’s even one notable example with the ogg vorbis audio format where Richard Stallman himself decided that relincensing it under BSD license instead of the LGPL would improve its adoption over the patented MP3 so clearly GPL isn’t always the right choice, but if people don’t actively push for copyleft licenses then we’ll forever be stuck in a world of companies actively blocking the spread of knowledge, selling us software filled with DRM and proprietary software, making insane profits, but graciously letting a few developers to contribute some of their company time back to these open source projects. I don’t think it’s fair and GPL may not be solution for all the problems, but what else it to be done?


  • I don’t think there’s a hidden conspiracy behind projects such as this one; it may be just that it’s simply much easier for projects with permissive licenses to take off as corporations and private entities are willing to sometimes submit patches and contribute to these projects on the side while sponsoring the developers with money. However, it’s still definitely not proportionate to the value that the community contributes back and basically gives to the corporations for free with most of them packaging these libraries and binaries and selling their software for much higher profit without ever contributing anything back. There is a reason why these permissive licenses are called the cuck licenses and I wish that more people would start caring about the license they publish their code under, but the sad reality is that, especially in the rust community, the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses became the de facto standard, and that was without much pressure from the big corporations, though rust has its origins under the umbrella of Mozilla so it’s not that surprising given this context.