[hexorg]

What the article fails to address is… We all need food. Yeah it’s great working on GPL code and ensuring it’s all open. But when companies consider your gpl library vs someone else’s mit library they will naturally go with mit. And then they’ll say “well we’re using this free library already might as well donate/fund it”. So suddenly this MIT dev is able to put way more time into the mit library than your gpl library because it becomes their job. Something that feeds them. Their library gets better faster… And more and more companies use it and fund it.

GPL is great if absolutely everyone is on board and everyone is fed. But that’s not the world we live in.

[zelphirkalt]

If we only took the time and effort developers work on GPL and AGPL stuff in their free time, and abolished all bad-but-done-for-profit-nevertheless projects, we would probably still make more progress, than we are doing now, when so many developers work on software, that is not only not advancing things or truly helping anyone, but is actually actively harmful, addictive, engagement optimized, advertising for bad products, or helping the overlords to surveil the uninformed masses.

[hexorg]

Yes, but it’s much easier said than done. The article talks about FSF being shadowed by all of the funding for MIT licensed code. So funding means of making GPL code more attractive to companies probably should be one of the higher priorities. Though I’m sure companies also ensure FSF and GPL get bad publicity .

[josephcsible]

Don't a ton of people get paid to work on the GPL'd Linux kernel?

[hexorg]

Yes but you can interface with Linux kernel without being required to use GPL license.