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by TaylorAlexander 2614 days ago
I mostly just want to abandon copyright. Everything I create lately - software, robots, and writing - are released with unrestricted licenses. CC0 or BSD in most cases. I tried copyleft briefly but all it seemed to do was limit other people. I don’t want to do that anymore.
3 comments
antpls 2614 days ago
In theory, I believe copyright is a way for individuals to defend their rights against big corps. In practice, it will only benefit big corps which have enough resources for judicial procedures, and force individuals to give up their creations for free...
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swiley 2614 days ago
As a user I'm pretty thankful for copyleft.

I probably wouldn't be able to run modern Linux on the laptop I'm using right now without it.

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TaylorAlexander 2614 days ago
Maybe, but that’s speculative. Unless you’ve got some good examples of the BSD style of license failing where GPL has succeeded (I’d be genuinely interested!). I know GPL has had some good wins, but more and more I feel like we need to fight this battle in our culture, not through lawyers.
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jimktrains2 2614 days ago
The recent kerfuffles with elastic, redis, and mongo will be interesting to follow and may provide examples where a strong copyleft, e.g. agpl3, would have been better than the Apache or mit/bad style licenses initially chosen.
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swiley 2614 days ago
I don’t know if it’s possible for that to happen since the licenses are mutually exclusive.

There are plenty of situations where BSD (or similar) lisenced software is used and the changes are not published.

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jimktrains2 2614 days ago
Just to clarify, you don't need to provide changes to GPL software if you're not distributing said software and only using it internally.

However, in case something ends up being distributed and because I don't believe that's been tested in the courts, many companies have blanket policies against the inclusion of copyleft licenses.

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imtringued 2614 days ago
That's also what I'm trying to do. Don't like non permissive copyright? Then just avoid it. However these filters are a threat to free software and the public domain. It wouldn't surprise me if github will wrongly take down projects in the future.
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