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by 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.

1 comments

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.
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.
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.

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.