this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
680 points (91.6% liked)
Programmer Humor
32050 readers
1631 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Copyleft licences are the only true free software licences. All other open source licenses are just proprietariable.
What do those words mean? What is proprietariable and copyleft? Or is that the joke?
Not a joke.
Copy left is like the Robin Hood of the copyright world. Basically, it’s a type of licensing where, sure, you can use, modify, and distribute the copyrighted work, but there’s a catch. You have to give the same rights to anyone else for any derivative works. So, if you modify the work, you can’t just slap a new copyright on it and restrict its use. It’s a way to ensure that the work stays free for everyone to use. It’s pretty popular in the open source community. It’s like copyright turned on its head, hence the name “copyleft”.
It's a shame the strategy is now failing because software as a service is so popular. Nothing in the GPL forces you to distribute your changes if you don't distribute the program. So just put the program on a webserver and let users interact through an API and hey presto, steal as much GPL code as you like.
Everyone crucified MongoDB when they tried to create a licence that prevents this, and FSF have declared that the problem can't be solved with licences and everyone just has to boycott non-free software (good luck!).
End of free software as we know it, IMHO.
Wasn't the Affero GPL (AGPL) created exactely to enforce copyleft in a SaaS environment?
Quoting from the GNU website: