[bayindirh]

As our resident GPL expert, you're right, but the reality differs a bit, with all the respect.

Companies doesn't like GPL because it mandates them to show hang their laundry outside. In turn, this creates a code quality pressure which companies doesn't want to pay for. Also, this visibility creates another, more psychological pressure on companies by exposing the external stuff they are using.

As a result, companies become more vulnerable to external pressure since somebody can point out what they are using without supporting and calling them out on it.

This can potentially send more money to developers, but this will not create value for the shareholders. Because having another yacht is more important than a pesky person's mental health and living conditions.

[pabs3]

The GPL doesn't mandate public disclosure of code, just offering code to your users, who probably won't even know what source code is, let alone download it, tell anyone about it, modify it or redistribute it.

The EU CRA law is going to start creating the code quality pressure you mention too, with financial and other penalties. So they will have to do the right thing eventually. Hopefully that will make the GPL more acceptable to them.

The external pressure thing applies to the permissive licenses too, since companies have to provide attribution as part of the MIT/BSD/etc licenses, usually by having copies of their copyright notices in the system settings of their devices, for example curl is permissively licenced, all the car companies use it, none of them sponsor curl, and curl is now complaining about that. Of course, its extremely unlikely any of those companies care. The CRA might make them care though.

https://mastodon.social/@bagder/115025727082593712

[bayindirh]

> The GPL doesn't mandate public disclosure of code, just offering code to your users...

That's the theory, and it's correct. We have discussed this with you before. However, a SaaS running AGPL code has to put it "out there", or mail to any user as soon as they register, so in this case it's moot.

Considering many GPL software is also distributed over the net, the code has to be "out there", again, in practice. Unless you are RedHat and selling the GPL software in question, which is perfectly fine.

> The external pressure thing applies to the permissive licenses too,...

Finding the copyright notices buried at the bottom of a text with the length of a Hollywood movie end-credits roll which is in turn buried 5 levels of menus is practically impossible if you don't try it. I can argue that GPL's condition is "in your face" when compared to permissive licenses.

Also, who will dig and find that I have used a specific library if I conveniently forgot to add its copyright line to this already long wall of text? "What will they do? Sue me from their mother's basement?" the companies think 99% of the time.

busybox has a tool to detect their inclusion in an embedded image, but that's GPL to begin with.

[pabs3]

> Finding the copyright notices buried ...

The GPL and BSD notices are usually in the same place, in the Settings -> About -> Legal notices dialog or similar.

> Also, who will dig and find that I have used a specific library if I conveniently forgot to add its copyright line to this already long wall of text?

People will still find out. The router I have violates both the BSD license, and the GPL. It simply has no copyright notices at all. The only indication it violates both is the web server 404 page links to the micro_httpd homepage, and the network filesystem feature uses the word samba. Thats probably more common than deliberately incomplete copyright notices. Even more common is wilful deliberate GPL violations.