The biggest scam that was ever pulled was convincing software developers that the GPL was somehow bad and out of vogue and that open source should prefer BSD, MIT, Apache, etc instead.

And now we have entire threads like this of people crying because some company used someone's software exactly as the license allows.

It's a shame, but there really is no sympathy for projects that choose the wrong license. Stallman knew this decades ago and somehow even now we're still learning it.

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u_fucking_dork 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s not that complicated. Most of us program for work, and can’t use GPL stuff at work.

People were optimizing for being the most useful and therefore getting the most use.

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lern_too_spel 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Alacritty is an application. Most of us use GPL applications at work.

	▲	u_fucking_dork 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Neither I nor the comment I replied to are talking about Alacritty

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Flimm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The GPL would not have prevented the scenario that the top-level comment complained about. Nothing in the GPL requires rich downstream projects to send money to poor upstream projects. That's by design. The four freedoms that Stallman preaches intentionally permit distributing the software to free riders.

	▲	petcat 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It would have prevented Warp from forking Alacritty and re-distributing it as a closed source product. That's what it's about. This whole scenario would have been impossible from the start because Warp would have been forced by the license to be good open source citizens.

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bluGill 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The biggest scam is GPL convincing people that the license will keep things open source. Every try contributing to Chrome's web engine? It started as GPL khtml, but good luck doing anything as google controls it. Meanwhile FreeBSD manages to get plenty of contributors.

Don't get me wrong, license is important. However it doesn't have nearly the effect many people claim.

	▲	mpyne 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		KHTML was LGPL, just as with the rest of the KDE libraries. Otherwise Apple wouldn't have been able to fork it in the first place.
	▲	lern_too_spel an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It is open source. You are free to fork it if you don't like the terms for contributing to that repo so long as your fork remains open source, just as Apple did with KHTML, Google did with Webkit, and Electron and Brave did with Blink. If Warp were open source to begin with, people would have been free to rip out the things they didn't like in it and build upon the things they liked, benefiting the project that was forked to begin with because they can do that as well.
	▲	LtWorf 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Without it, chrome would be closed source entirely.