The same could be said of corporations who aren’t required to report pollution and thus exploit because it’s legal. Morality isn’t encoded in most agreements.
The entire premise of copyleft is taking advantage of copyright law to be able to represent moral expectations in the copyright license. Within the limits of copyright law is plenty of room to choose something restrictive enough to fit with whatever you want. If you pick a permissive license and people use your software in accordance with that license, complaining just doesn't make sense. The license you have them explicitly allows this. It's not a loophole, it's not a mistake in the license, it's not something that the license authors didn't foresee, it is a feature.
It is unfortunate when people make decisions that have legal ramifications they do not understand, but there's gotta be at least a little personal responsibility here. It's no different for code than anything else. There was a case not long ago where someone who made royalty free music changed their mind and tried to make copyright claims against people who had used their music in their YouTube videos. But can we be fair here? If you released this thing with an explicit royalty free license like that, can you really get mad because you can't get royalties that you clearly didn't expect in the first place?
If you're worried that you may regret releasing your own works under open source licenses, permissive or copyleft, then simply don't do it. The downside is that you can't be a direct part of the open source ecosystem, either by using existing (non-permissive) libraries or by being adopted by other open source software, but the thing is the vast majority of developers are aware of what they're signing up for. If someone makes a million dollars off of your open source software, you can have an expected paycheck of $0.00, and that even goes if it's copyleft. The plus side of this trade-off is that it enables anyone to take advantage of your software, even if they wouldn't normally have the means of licensing a product for their use case, with very low friction, providing the maximum benefit.
Copyright law, though, certainly does let you encode the expectation that "if you want to make money using this you must pay me", so if that's your expectation, don't use licenses that contradict it, especially not just because it is trendy.
jchw|10 months ago
It is unfortunate when people make decisions that have legal ramifications they do not understand, but there's gotta be at least a little personal responsibility here. It's no different for code than anything else. There was a case not long ago where someone who made royalty free music changed their mind and tried to make copyright claims against people who had used their music in their YouTube videos. But can we be fair here? If you released this thing with an explicit royalty free license like that, can you really get mad because you can't get royalties that you clearly didn't expect in the first place?
If you're worried that you may regret releasing your own works under open source licenses, permissive or copyleft, then simply don't do it. The downside is that you can't be a direct part of the open source ecosystem, either by using existing (non-permissive) libraries or by being adopted by other open source software, but the thing is the vast majority of developers are aware of what they're signing up for. If someone makes a million dollars off of your open source software, you can have an expected paycheck of $0.00, and that even goes if it's copyleft. The plus side of this trade-off is that it enables anyone to take advantage of your software, even if they wouldn't normally have the means of licensing a product for their use case, with very low friction, providing the maximum benefit.
Copyright law, though, certainly does let you encode the expectation that "if you want to make money using this you must pay me", so if that's your expectation, don't use licenses that contradict it, especially not just because it is trendy.
jjmarr|10 months ago
01HNNWZ0MV43FF|10 months ago
theamk|10 months ago
It is super easy to release things under AGPL today. If people don't, it is an explicit decision.