This perfectly summarizes my feeling about software licenses.

I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that.

The rest is self-importance from bitter old men.

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Telaneo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that.

If we can have this, but for everything, so films, books, TV, music and everything else, I'd agree. This however is not the world we live in. The amount of culture we could have from people remixing the past 50 years worth of culture would be incredible. Instead, we're stuck with the same stuff we were over 70 years ago.

The amount of progress we could make in software is probably on a similar level, but the problem is the same as it is with the cultural artefacts. So instead we're stuck in a world where money makes right, since you need money to uphold the laws intended to protect Intellectual Property™. I can't blame ffmpeg for working within the rules of the system, even if the system sucks.

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dzaima 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or even just, have this also apply to the code produced by those using my code. But while that's not the case, copyleft licenses (especially GPL (not LGPL)) are a way to force it to be the case to at least limited extent.

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iLoveOncall 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Code is not culture, nor art. I'm not sure why you'd want to compare them.

	▲	Telaneo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I want more high quality code and I want more high quality culture. Both have one major obstacle in the way and is at the core of this post, my comment and yours: Copyright. I fail to see why we should make exceptions to copyright for the sake of code, but not for the sake of culture.