Is the GPL Really Declining?

There's a difference between 'open by default' and 'open by purpose'. You might reflexively reach for MIT or Apache, but the GPL might align better with your actual business needs. Simon Wardley gave a decent presentation about strategy mapping a few years ago and mentions it at the end of his talk: https://youtu.be/NnFeIt-uaEc

> The only reason I use GIMP is that Adobe software isn't available on Ubuntu. Sure, some artists have used it to create great works but that speaks more to their capabilities as artists than GIMP's as software.

Do you think the tool ever makes the artist? I have seen great works of art made with a pencil. A piece of coal. A twig and blood. A simple needle and ink. I have seen great works of art made using Microsoft Paint.

> Ubuntu is pretty solid but I would be a liar if I wouldn't admit it has serious flaws (e.g. making the user execute superuser shell commands to test and enable hibernation is pretty shitty UX). I'm tech-savvy enough to be willing to accept these trade-offs but I can easily see the appeal of macOS (even if the naysayers are right and Apple have lost their way).

I don't like Ubuntu and I don't use it. But, there are plenty of things that can only be done using a terminal in macOS, as well. In fact, macOS/Apple is pretty much known for hiding things from their GUIs.

Anyway, I do not agree that typing in commands are bad UX. Many things are far easier and faster to do in a terminal than through a GUI. One example: installing software.

> I started off the year by giving a couple of alternative browsers a chance to wean me off my reliance on Google Chrome and even Brave was a more workable solution than Firefox: in order to make Firefox work properly I had to learn about its multiprocessing mode and individually test extensions from the official addon hub for compatibility. And while the dev tools certainly feel like a lot of effort went into them they come nowhere near the UX of Chrome's.

Why are you talking about browsers and comparing Firefox to Chrome, are you trying to compare open source vs closed-source? Do you know what Chromium is?

It sounds like you are actually trying to say something as stupid as: open source projects are generally worse than closed source projects?

> EDIT: Pragmatically IMO the freedom of the end user matters less because they need more than just access to the source code to derive any value of having that access, whereas for a downstream developer the value of being able to do as they please is extremely direct.

Again, like I said, that's clearly debatable.

First I think we need to shoehorn some terminology into this conversation in order for it to be useful.

You have two clearly distinct roles. You call them "developer" and "user", but that's really imprecise and doesn't correctly capture the use-cases which we're discussing, so here's my attempt:

* A publisher (what you call a "developer", someone who releases software, different software, one which will have to "deal" with reciprocal licenses).

* A user (one which runs software, usually on devices he own).

It may not be the norm, but a user may very well build and modify the software he uses (that is: do development work), and submit patches back upstream (instead of forking/bundling the code and modifications in another product). So while clearly a developer, he is first and foremost a user, and he doesn't need to care about licensing, since he doesn't actually release anything on his own.

Example: As a user of a device I buy, I want to be able to modify and replace its firmware when I find it lacking. In this case I'm a user, not a developer, at least not until the need arises.

And a "normal user" may not be able to do all these things, but as others have noted, there may be a pre-existing development community which has pre-modified builds available (like Cyanogendmod, OpenWrt, Coreboot, whatever).

In that sense, things being open to me, the user, the owner of the device running the code, has an high value anyhow. Not having control over what runs on my devices is unacceptable in a post-Snowden, emerging IoT-ridden world.

And I think those concerns are much more important for the IoT-everywhere world we're moving into, than some mere licensing inconveniences for publishers when they free of charge incorporate other people's work into their own product.

Your observations don't correlate with the actual political opinions of prominent advocates of what boils down to the ages-old free software vs open source split. You don't need to look further than ESR for a striking counterexample.

I would not use GPL for my projects, because I can not use GPL licensed libraries in work. We use plenty of Apache licensed libs, therefore when I did open source contributions I contributed back to that pool. It was no brainer to me.

I also like the freedom in it - GPL is a bit about forcing people to do things your way because ideology which is attitude I find offputing. Apache is less political and more giving - here is a thing use it.