Is the GPL Really Declining?

I totally understand where you're coming from and I shared some of this. I still believe heavily in the GPL and I think more permissive license have allowed a lot of companies to wave the banner of OSS while not having to really contribute things back to the community.

I come from a perspective of hating the corporate world for the two decades I've been in it; feeling deeply overpaid compared to the guy who cleans my trash bins every day who I feel should be paid more.

The old 1990s/2000s vision was of a more just and equitable society. Today we have garbage like Android where vendors just release binary blobs and don't contribute anything useful back (non-upstreamble patched and proprietary/custom/terrible kernels).

The people who originally wrote a lot of OSS and Linux software were envisioning a world where Adobe tools would be replaced by Gimp/Inkspace and the Ubuntu desktop would make Windows obsolete except for specific MS software/tasks. That never happened.

Today software is more closed than ever. You can't run a modern x86_64 system with open firmware, and most companies simply release middle ware under an MIT/Apache license. They want you to build tools that work with their closed garden platforms, but not re-create their platforms.

My path has been pretty much opposite: a long time ago, I was a big fan of BSD-flavored freedom and thought that commercial adoption of open technology was the best thing that could happen. After years of eating my own dogfood and seeing open code used solely as free work, with no regard to user or developer freedom, I'm not so convinced.

Frankly, I was cynically happy when a lot of GNU projects were licensed under GPLv3, and suddenly everyone who locks down their firmware (which is usually a big hunk of GPL code + a piece of shit web UI) was sent scrambling for alternatives and, gasp, even having to -- hear this! -- pay for the software that they proceed to resell. Outrageous. It also fueled the development of really good alternatives. It did make my life more difficult, but I'm satisfied that it also made life more difficult for companies that lock down their users and whose business model is largely planned obsolescence + no privacy.

(Note that this is heavily skewed towards embedded systems :-) )

One thing I still considerably like about BSD-type licenses is that they do not incentivize "community leadership and involvement" and half-baked upstream contributions for the sake of companies being seen as "thought-leaders" in their respective "communities". It does mean less upstream support for a lot of things (most visibly drivers), but it also means that crap in-house hacks stay in-house rather than being "contributed back" to communities whose users don't really want them, but don't really have a choice now that the community leaders are largely corporations engaging in free software circlejerking. This involvement for marketing's sake is a big part of why using a Linux system is so painful nowadays, six or seven years after it no longer needed to be so painful.

The main reason for this in my opinion is that the fear free software had of permissive licenses in the 90s by an large didn't come true.

The GPL is excellent to guard against the sort of embrace, extend and close that the GPL prevented when it came to GCC, Emacs etc. back in its day, but would likely have otherwise happened.

Times are different now, and while there's still some of that going on (e.g. Sony with FreeBSD) for the vast majority of free software out there companies see no point in maintaining some value-added fork, it's just going to cost them money. E.g. SQLite & cURL are a good example of this.

Nowadays your project is much more likely to die because of overly restrictive licensing than because some company steals it from you and refuses to give back. Imagine how much smaller SQLite would be if it was GPL 3 instead of public domain, ditto for cURL.

Comparing the mid to late 90s with today it seems hackers have on the whole become more commercially minded. Back in the 90s there was a more idealistic and 'punk' ethos surrounding the hacker scene with documents like the Hacker Manifesto being a thing people actually believed in and aspired to. The GPL fit right into that.

Then the world changed a bit and all of a sudden people realized that you could become both a millionaire and even a billionaire as a software developer. And do you know what's cooler than being part of an idealistic punk scene? A billion dollars!

Now licenses that got in the way of you making money weren't as attractive anymore. And licenses that made it easier for you to make money off of software written by other people became the new hot thing.

That at least is my naive take on what I've observed over the past 20-odd years.

> The people who originally wrote a lot of OSS and Linux software were envisioning a world where Adobe tools would be replaced by Gimp/Inkspace and the Ubuntu desktop would make Windows obsolete except for specific MS software/tasks. That never happened.

The reason that never happened has nothing to do with the licenses. It happened because most purely open source programs have abysmal UX. Every time I open Inkscape on my retina macbook I feel like I'm grinding the machine against concrete - it's slow, looks awful, doesn't scale and doesn't use the system's native UI libraries. Somehow all of RMS's charm never seems quite enough to convince designers to fix the glaring, obvious problems.