I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don’t see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It’s like they’re painting their faces with “here, take my stuff and don’t contribute anything back, that’s totally fine”
I"m with you on copyleft, but if I had any connection to the project and felt the need to add a reaction emoji, it’d probably be a “thumbs-down” as well.
It’s not because I’m against the GPL, but because of the way the GitHub comment is written.
It doesn’t even say “you should use the GPL”, it says “you MUST say GNU doesn’t agree with you”. I’m perplexed.
Now, I respect the idea of GNU, but the way GNUers in general go about behaving themselves is perfect to alienate people, and this GitHub issue is a prime example. I don’t get it.
If people don’t know about GNU, tell them. Nicely.
If people have misconceptions about GNU, there’s nothing wrong with fixing them. Again, nicely.
The problem is, whenever I encounter GNU and however much I agree with them on key issues (which is at about 90%, my main gripe with them being Freedom 0), they just have a knack to get me, someone who is with them on most issues, annoyed at them. I can clearly see how someone who isn’t as alligned with them as I am gets equally annoyed and avoids GPL and GNU like the plague just to fuck with 'em (while fucking over everyone, including themselves). Not to mention ones into the libertarian stream, since you yourself covered that pretty well.
What the GitHub issue you linked that I keep coming back to shows is this GNU herd mentality of fucking over others unintentionally and in turn fucking over everyone. While they’re clearly better than the “libtards”, they still end up doing the same mistake.
That sounds a lot more confrontational and less diplomatic.
The ticket was actually indirectly asking it, by explaining the potential problems with non-copyleft. They just added “If you plan to carry on…” to introduce a compromise, which actually allowed for at least some minor change to be made, and made it clear that the different license is intentional and not just for lack of awareness (which would imply the devs have no intention on switching).
Somehow you added the “MUST” to this sentence, but not to the first one… even though the github issue did not say they MUST, instead it even used the word “please” and appealed to having some deference to the GNU coreutils.
At least this issue managed to get a change through for clarity… I don’t think you would have gotten anything at all with the other approach.
There is another issue on their tracker that was opened many years ago about relicensing to GPL, but it kind of became one of those things where a bunch of people came in and discussed it back and forth to death with no resolution.
I remember the lead developer of the Rust version of Coreutils gave a talk about the project once and he addressed the licensing question by essentially saying (paraphrasing), “I don’t care about this. So I just picked one.” You’d think someone so involved with open source as that guy (seriously, he has a hugely impressive pedigree) would care, or would at least give a justification.