Context:
Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “removed licenses”) like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.
Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.
Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that’s suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.
Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.
Yes, of course GPL is good for some things. But it being called the pinnacle of freedom is just wrong. It claims that it’s freedom for the users, but that’s not true.
In the case of libraries, the users of the libraries are not the end users of the program. The users of the library are the developers. GPL is NOT freedom for developers.
I completely agree that programs having a GPL license is positive. You can even use them with complete freedom in commercial settings!
The one freedom the GPL removes is the freedom to be a leech. If you’re linking to GPL code, you are agreeing to follow the same rules as everybody else who has contributed to that code. Nobody gets a pass
Except the end user does inevitably become the user of the library when they use the software the developer made with it. They run that library’s code on their machine.
In light of the above, this is incorrect. By using GPL, you preserve the end user’s freedom to understand, control, and modify the operation of their hardware. In no way does the end user suffer or lose any freedoms.
I know that the end user is the focus of GPL. But me, when choosing a library, as a user, I tend to avoid using GPL ones, because they restrict my freedom. In consequence, my end users (of which there are aproximately 0 anyway) don’t get GPL code either way.