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by justinmeiners 2300 days ago
Why does good things coming from another license mean GPL isn't working? GPL guarantees a lot of rights that an important minority of developers finds valuable . If you don't care for it, Im not here to convince you, but I think you should be glad it at least exists.
2 comments

You are right -- the GPL has been enormously important to the free software movement. I (perhaps wrongly) interpreted your post as being anti-permissive more than pro-copyleft. My apologies!
makes sense, I like permissive licenses too.
The existence of LLVM means that GCC's GPL can't really guarantee anything anymore. 20 years ago we got an open-source objective-C compiler because its implementers wanted to reuse GCC's backend. But today a company in the same situation would just use the LLVM backend.
Except with LLVM they wouldn't need to return their work to GCC, like NeXT was forced to do with their frontend.
That's exactly my point. GCC's copyleft was only effective when there wasn't a viable permissive-licensed alternative.