Development quote of the week [LWN.net]

Nobody is going to try to make money on a proprietary fork of an MIT Coreutils. Nobody is hiding their trade secrets there. This isn't the 80s.
What is a bigger issue is the more symbolic nature of things. People had the opportunity to pick a copyleft licence and chose not to. We can view this as an attack on copyleft (albeit one that's likely symbolic at best), or we can accept that the copyleft community has been doing a poor job winning the hearts and minds of new generations of developers

— Matthew Garrett

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Oh, let no one else scroll over the subsequent comments.

Posted Mar 20, 2025 3:30 UTC (Thu) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, I'm setting myself up as a target. I scrolled over many of the responses. I did not see new ones. May we please find new aspects to discuss and fix?

Not being a spring chicken, my first contribution to gnu.misc.discuss was rehashing well-trodden ground. I realized much, much, much later that I had done so. How can we educate folks about the long-standing debate points? If we can find such a way, maybe the new folks can find new avenues for discussion and progress?

Oh, let no one else scroll over the subsequent comments.

Posted Mar 21, 2025 12:38 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I really don't have an answer because most of the arguments are circular going back to the 1980's. [First gnu.misc.discuss was 1988 I think... so I guess I am a youngun because my 'new' ideas were pointed out to be things discussed years earlier...] To be honest the well trod ground is something that established groups love to argue around more than anyone coming up with something new. It becomes a sort of ceremony where everyone brings up the things they have said multiple times and go away feeling that things were complete.. [brains are stupid this way]

I agree with Matthew Garret's central point is that 'CopyLeft' software has not really aged well in 'selling' why it is important in an age when all the code is 'free beer' on some corporations webservers. In fact 'CopyLeft' comes across as a negative because it seems to put a 'price' on the 'Free Beer'. I agree it is a price, but to me its like building my house on solid ground versus the easier to build on and possibly prettier river. The river hasn't flooded and we have put in lots of flood controls which keep it from doing so.. but over time keeping up those flood controls will get expensive and eventually things fall apart... [not sure the analogy is worth arguing any further as it is a weak one.]