[greenhouse_gas]

While I personally like the GPL philosophy, I think that its days in protecting free software is numbered.

The purpose of the GPL was to encourage companies to publish their software under the GPL (want to use readline, got to use GPL). The long term goal was to create an environment where GPL software was so much better than the alternative that closed-source software would just whither.

This made sense in the 1980s. Remember that gnu was started when RMS found that he couldn't modify a program he needed - at the dawn of proprietary software.

This was a time when software writing was a small-scale operation (emacs was written by one? individual, Unix by two or three, etc.) and college students/professors could easily outnumber commercial software houses.

It actually worked for a while - gnu actually won a objective-C compiler purely due to the GPL.

Now, on the other hand, nowadays software companies are huge and have huge teams. Even without llvm's academic base, Apple would have enough cash to build it on their own.

[pjmlp]

Now that printer driver will be written with code taken from a Github project MIT/BSD license and the company won't make it available to anyone, using firmware encrypted with TPM, thus getting full circle to those days while having higher profits for the printer company, thanks to lower development costs.

[cyphar]

> Now, on the other hand, nowadays software companies are huge and have huge teams. Even without llvm's academic base, Apple would have enough cash to build it on their own.

Why make it easier for them? Very few companies can be like Apple (and even Apple didn't write everything from scratch). Compromising allows more companies to wrong their users, it's not helpful to treat companies like people -- without a profit motive most companies won't liberate their software.