[683686285]

Freedom to me is whatever exists in the absence of coercion. GPL licenses depends on coercion, so they cannot produce freedom as I see it.

To illustrate this, imagine an alternative universe where violence is impossible. In this universe IP as we know it including copyleft licenses couldn't exist as violence or credible threats of violence by a state (or similar entity) is required for enforcement. I want to get as close to this hypothetical universe as possible by avoiding everything that depends on violence and coercion as far as possible.

[Seirdy]

The only thing that the GPL family prevents is coercion, effectively reaching a local minima of coercion-by-others as a function of coercion-by-vendor.

Granting the freedom to coerce doesn't reduce coercion.

[683686285]

Not distributing source code is not coercion. GPL forces people to do work in exchange for a promise that they will not be subject to volience, that's coercion.

[seba_dos1]

You're right that in a universe where everyone grants their end users necessary freedoms and don't use coercion to limit those rights, GPL would be completely unnecessary. Until that happens, coercing people to stop further coercion is the best thing we have.

[683686285]

I'm taking about a universe where violence is impossible. Not a universe where people are compelled to distribute source code whenever they have distributed a binary file.

I'm fundamentally opposed to the idea of forcing people to do what I want and that's the clear purpose of GPL.

Somebody not doing what I want is not coercing me. I'm free to use or not use a binary distributed without it's source code, or I can try to reverse engineer it. Forcing them to do the additional work of sending me the source code would be coercing them, it would be impossible in my hypothetical alternative universe, and it would be wrong in this universe.

[goodpoint]

GPL *protects* against tivoization, proprietarization and patent trolling. It partially protects from SaaS.

These are all things that currently threaten the freedom of users and developers.

Ramblings about impossible alternative universes adds very little.

[683686285]

Your definition of freedom seem to be other people doing what you want them to do. That's not how I see freedom. Someone offering software as a service is not a threat to anyone's freedom. Preventing them from doing so by the threat of state violence makes both the business and it's potential customers less free.