It's not proprietary software. It can simply be moved out from under his umbrella. That's the point of Free Software. He's only a dictator via their consent.
Similarly, if you truly don't support RMS, don't provide hosting, mirrors or funding for the projects under his control.
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sure, the projects can move. a few things -
* capital GNU used to be a badge of honor. I bet it still is linked to funding etc. for some projects.
* it will take time for these projects to get off of GNU infra / websites if they make that decision. 1/
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* GNU is still very much intertwined with FSF, via infrastructure, websites, and people.
* AFAIK, FSF actually foots the bill for the bulk of GNU operations.
* Copyright for GNU projects has generally been assigned to FSF. This used to be seen as a safety measure for projects. 2/
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The owner of the copyright doesn't matter beyond ability to change the license and the people who would need to enforce the license. If they want the software to be under the licenses that it's currently under then the copyright owner doesn't really matter.
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it matters as well for enforcement. which is a big deal for bash et al which are shipped in billions of machines. I'm sure you're familiar with the busybox litigation.
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FSF has never had teeth when it comes to enforcement. They've deliberately weakened the ability to enforce the GPL and focused on simply obtaining compliance after the fact rather than setting an example.
landley.net/toybox/about.h is quickly making the BusyBox stuff irrelevant.
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Personally, I've given up on anything but permissive licenses and will primarily support and contribute to projects with permissive licenses.
Bad actors violate the licenses anyway and it gets in the way of using it via license incompatibilities and other painful restrictions.
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IMO it's important for someone to hold the line with copyleft, and strong(er) copyleft. If that's not you and your projects, cool.
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Hold what line? Most of those projects already have better permissively licensed alternatives.
LLVM is superior on a technical level and drastically better for building other tooling (not even a comparison) compared to GCC/binutils.
Same applies to many other portions of it.
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that's because there have been dedicated efforts by powerful actors to replace copyleft components. Amazon and Google have policies against integrating more copyleft code. This is a problem. For ex, Fuschia could user in a more locked-down mobile ecosystem. And that's just mobile
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I'm not sure what you think Fuchsia changes about licensing. Linux kernel is GPLv2 and the Android userspace is strictly more permissive than it.
GPLv2 doesn't prevent making a locked down device and there has been major avoidance of using GPLv3 software since it was introduced.
From a *BSD perspective, GPL software is often regarded as being non-free and they also work on making alternatives to it.
For them, it's a bigger problem that people take their code and build on it via GPL licensed code without contributing back rather than as proprietary code.
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Any permissively licensed project can't take GPL code because it would change their overall license to a restrictive one.
GrapheneOS has a strict policy against integrating GPLv3 code because it prevents building things we want people to be able to build with our software.
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I agree with you re: the problems you identify, but it's a long road from that --> discarding copyleft licensing or stating it's irrelevant, IMO. twitter threads are probably not the place to make my case on this and I'm not sure how we got diverted here anyway.