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For your first question, this is mostly about legal interpretability. The GPL has a long text that describes explicitly what it allows and doesn't. Yes, that is based on an ethical framework, but that ethical framework is all baked into the text of the license. There is no ambiguity. The GP contrasts this with the JSON license which only uses the term 'good' to describe what it allows. This is incredibly ambiguous from a court's perspective, likely past the point of just being thrown out as a clause in a legal contract. For your second question, you are right that you don't have 'complete freedom,' which another commenter pointed out cannot even theoretically exist. The closest you really get is public domain, in which you're not even restricted like the MIT; you don't even have to list the author! (IANAL, so this is not legal advice, but just my understanding.) However, the GPL is not interested in guaranteeing complete freedom, in the style of very permissive licenses. Instead, it's interested in maximizing end-user freedom. An MIT library can immediately be placed in a proprietary program, and now the end-user has none of the Four Freedoms, though the author of the program still has all of them. So, the GPL puts restrictions on developers and how they can use the software ('limiting freedom', if you want, though it's the freedom to limit others' Four Freedoms that is being limited), to guarantee that the Four Freedoms reach the end-user. This does lead to incompatibility as you've outlined, and so goreportcard would have to adopt the GPL to use the library and remain compliant (again, IANAL), but from the perspective of the GNU foundation, this maximizes the total number of freedoms retained because it continues to protect end-users. I hope this helps, I wanted to expand on what the goals of the GPL actually are, since you seemed to earnestly be asking. |