| "(2) not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others" If you want to put it to the test, try creating a legal derivative work of a GPL/LGPL licensed project. The license has enough grey area that the only guarantee is that the legal system could one day be used to subject you to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others. Via legal battles initiated by malicious actors and/or as a result of contributions by contributors who don't fully understand the depth of the GPL/LGPL restrictions. I vote 'no confidence' in the GPL/LGPL license's purported guarantee of freedom. For the same reasons I wouldn't trust an enemy to always speak kindly of me behind my back. The GPL/LGPL were bourne out of the desire to publicly spite others. They were initially accepted as canon because they were the first copyleft licenses. I'll never feel safe or protected from legal recourse if I contribute to a GPL/LGPL project because I can never guarantee that the codebase is a completely original work. From a legal standpoint 'good faith' simply isn't good enough. It's a personal choice. If you feel completely safe contributing under the terms, by all means, I'm not trying to stop you. "Proprietary licenses and DRM are frameworks that arbitrary limits who can modify the software, who can read it, and who can use and share it." By all means, I'm not advocating for proprietary licenses or DRM. I'm speaking strictly in terms of OSS (ex MIT) vs FLOSS (GPL/LGPL). If a company or dev decides to use a proprietary license to protect their invested time/effort, that's their legal right. DRM is... Well, I'm not going to touch that with a 20ft pole. Hopefully, one day we can find a means to make DRM completely irrelevant and/or unnecessary. |