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kekumu | 4 years ago

For anyone not very familiar with copyleft, the actual goal is:

> My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. [1]

Free as in freedom for the users of the software to control, audit, and modify what runs on their hardware.

The stipulations are there to prevent people who aren't aligned with those goals from benefiting from (and working against) the work done by the community that believes in those goals.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

discuss

order

throw0101a|4 years ago

Being forced to release source code is a restriction. Some people are okay with that, and others want totally unrestricted code available.

morelisp|4 years ago

> others want totally unrestricted code available.

It's easy to give the lie to this, because the restriction they are unhappy with is the restriction against restricting others. Anyone complaining about that is just masking a demand of "free for me, but not for thee" - definitely _not_ "totally unrestricted."