Scapegoating free software’s failures

All of the licenses this person defends have serious defects which are being ignored here. FSF saw and understood there were many weaknesses in gplv2 which is why they worked so hard on gplv3, which is the standard bearer for copy left in my opinion, including it's derivatives like a/l(gpl).

The main criticism that is valid is the "gunshy enforcement" by FSF, but if you listen to people like Eben Moglen they are very open about the fact that they have been working on the long game of getting into a position where enforcement would be effective instead of weaken the copyleft movement via a failed enforcement action, and that they have known it would take many years and even decades before the law side would catch up and be ready. I do think they need to step it up, but these are things that FSF et al already acknowledge and are working to address.

I have to admit a certain amount of conflicting views here, as I am at the same time sympathetic to entities afraid of doing work that others might then use and profit off of without contributing back (such as MangoDB claims), but I am also sensitive to claims that the licenses they are pursing could also be used as a cudgel to get more people towards paying them instead of using FOSS versions, and also to the fear of corps that SSPL could be a dangerous license if misconstrued. Which is why Mongo was dropped by RedHat, Fedora and Debian...

In general I think that (a/l)gplv3 did most of the work actually needed to solve these issues, and that attempts like SSPL, however laudable, are likely to fracture and weaken FOSS as a whole and, being incompatible with gpl, I cannot support them. There are ideas there that are important and should be discussed however.

I have put my actions where my mouth is on this issue. I have worked very hard to make the majority of my daily desktop and server stacks gpl or gpl compatible. (which means I steer far clear of mit/bsd licensed things if I can) The few exceptions are things I always keep an eye out for alternatives on.

An interesting SO on the SSPL: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7522/sspl-and...

In essence, I mark it as a sign of honest discussion when someone admits the weaknesses to their arguments. There is none of that here, ergo...

Interesting. If you were given the copy on a computer owned by your employer, is it your copy or theirs?

Your employer is an entity (a person, an LLC, or a corporation), you work for that entity. The entity is allowed to distribute it among themselves but the entity prevents itself from distributing to others (by following the license constraints). You, the employee, do not gain the right to the software because the employer did not give you, personally, any permission to the software.

Only once the software has been distributed by the employer to a third party do you, the employee, get rights to that GPL software. You can replace GPL with other licenses, the premise remains the same: an employee is part of the employer and not a separate entity.

Just my opinion, but the author sounds like a corporate shill (I realize he is a VC): “ The old, creaky pillars of the free software movement need convenient scapegoats, because the facts on the ground raise serious doubt about the effectiveness of their leadership and the byzantine, insular ideology of copyleft they impose.”

The state of software development and benefits to society from FSF licenses are, I believe, manifest.

I also support other open source licenses, I am not criticizing them, I am merely defending FSF licenses.

I guess that my personal bullshit meter gets tripped up when something is an attack rather than a balanced discussion.

The header said “Venture Capital Shill”, so I thought I was using a term he self identified with. Maybe I was wrong about that and it is just the title of the article.