Why copyleft?

[sounds]

a moral imperative

Pot, meet kettle.

[StudlyCaps]

Pot, meet kettle.

Not really following you here. I don't think I'm moralizing.

[linguofreak]

In a theoretical sense I think the FSF represents a kind of ultimate alienation of programmers from their labour. They do all the work, but the economic rewards for that work go to SaaS providers who repackage their products as managed services,

The economic benefit was already going to the large tech companies anyways. What copyleft does is that now programmers working for large tech companies can do things like *reusing code that they wrote at one job at another job*, or *reusing code that they wrote at work in hobby projects*. The code resulting from their work is now less likely to end up locked up forever behind their employer's proprietary license (how's *that* for being alienated from your labor?).

Now, are Stallman and the FSF full of ****? Quite. All the linking restrictions in the main GPL are problematic in a number of ways (like, how are you going to enforce them without arguing *for* the copyrightability of APIs, which all of the FSF's favorite corporate bogeymen will just *love*). But the general concept of copyleft is fairly sound.

[zaval]

for me, all this FSF/GPL/copyleft thing is just a lunacy of one man, that has turned into a religion. craze for those, that are more stupid, benefit for those, that are smarter, that is. it's weird, that it happened, but on the other hand, all (many) religions probably appeared like this. just new realities, new religions. maybe one day, we will get something similar about I don't know tiktok "stories". still, it looks funny to read their "philosophy". I genuinely don't understand how software is any different from everything else, made by people and why it necessarily should be open sourced. so, when I read, that "proprietary software is amoral and a social issue", I am like pff, yeah, dude, whatever, take your pills and go keep eating your toe cheese, please.

[chilly]

Why copyleft? Because hard-core socialist types like to take advantage of the legal system to push their political ideology on everyone else. Or maybe not, who knows.