| It is wrong that the license is absolutely not important for the end-user. Most users might not directly care about the license of the software they use, especially between free software licenses, but they might care about the consequences even if they are not aware of the causal relation. You might not know anything about how the engine works in your car but it is still important that it is made correctly. The whole Free Software movement targets end users and works on the assumption that these questions are important for them. Licenses might look like non significant technical details to most end users, but they are not, and many people not in the field are able to understand the subtleties. We should consider people's ignorance inevitable. This is not a fact we can't do anything about. Software is omnipresent in our societies and as massive effects on them. They have the right to know, should care, and actually often do if you don't push them. I know, I tried. > all the proprietary blobs Which ones? Nvidia seems to the exception here, and only concerns Nvidia's hardware anyway. If you think of Android drivers, they are in user space libraries (Had the Linux kernel been in a non-copyleft license, they would probably live in kernel space and working out the shitty situation of Android with the kernel would be far more difficult. Thanks to the Linux kernel being under GPL, Android vendors and manufacturers are forced to release their kernel sources, which allows projects like Lineage OS and other Android derivatives to exist. > or potentially worsened kernel I can't imagine why kernel developers would accept a patch that knowingly worsens the kernel upstream. The GPL forces shitty hardware makers to release their shitty code but nobody is forced to merge it upstream. bad closed firmware are unfortunate but I don't know what it has to do with Linux being under the GPL. |