GPL advocates are inherently copyright advocates. The premise that copyleft undermines or subverts copyright is a joke. It's just copyright in the usual form, restricting what people can do and needing to be enforced through the legal system. Only helps people with money/power.
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It's about trying to harness the power structures to empower the powerless. If you're young you won't remember a world dominated by proprietary software.
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Copyright monopoly enforced by the state will always empower the rich and powerful. GPL is part of that system. Copyleft doesn't subvert copyright but rather supports it and depends on it. GPL supports and reinforces existing power structures. It didn't tear them down.
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Without laws the strong dominate the weak. Having fair and just laws and enforcement is an endless struggle (that Copyleft is part of) but I'll chose that over anarchy. I don't want a lord of the flies life.
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I don't see anything just about a government enforced monopoly on certain ideas and speech. The legal system used to enforce these things is heavily slanted against anyone without money and power. There's hardly anything fair, just or reasonable about it.
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Those laws and the legal system are a major part of how the strong dominate the weak rather than how you're portraying it. GPL was originally intended to subvert copyright but it doesn't do that. It's just another form of it with the same problems.
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twitter.com/DanielMicay/st
Needing to block people from using this system to harm us further is important.
Thinking copyright is almost entirely harmful and that patents as implemented do more harm than good also doesn't mean that I'm somehow against all government regulation.
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Replying to @ian @awakecoding and 4 others
Primarily to stop malicious people who previously filed fraudulent copyright claims over our work from doing the same with trademarks.
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Are you saying that there are ways to use IP law to protect people rather than just powerful interests? Because if so we 100% agree on that, which is nice.
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You seem to value users being able to know that when they think they're getting a product they're actually getting it - so do I. I also value users having the right to modify (or have modified) the software they use, but I think I value that more than you do - which is fine.
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Users modifying software are developers. It only does any good for most users if those developers distribute the software to them. It's a core part of using it. GPL heavily restricts how the software can be used. Can't even mix Linux kernel code with coreutils. That's ridiculous.
It's a draconian set of rules for something that's supposed to be open source and usable for anything. GPL restrictions have led to a whole bunch of technical and organizational problems. Does a lot to prevent development of the OS as a whole and collaboration between projects.
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Permissively licensed projects can freely share code. GPLv2 and GPLv3 projects can't even share code with each other among other incompatibilities. GPL projects can and do take permissively licensed code, which is the same kind of one way path as a closed source project doing it.
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Concretely, if a user buys a customized WordPress install or plugin and they want modifications made to it they can hire any developer to do that. The GPL means that they're not locked into the original supplier. It's Right To Repair for software.
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