Nah, not really.
Hi, I use a permissive license for my stuff so that other open source devs can use it in their projects even if they disagree on the details of licensing opinions.
That doesn’t make me some kind of liberal/centrist/“not a Real Free Software Person™”.
Sure, that also gives companies the ability to use it in proprietary stuff, but they’re not gonna be interested in it and there’s a good chance they’d just blatantly ignore the license anyway (see: the “AI training” shit).
– Frost
sbeak@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
I don’t think that’s a good comparison. The ideas of “liberalism” (usually focusing on the rights of the individual) and “leftism” (usually focusing on social justice) are so broad that they aren’t very good descriptors.
A more suitable analogy would be a free-flowing river vs a dam. The free river allows all the water to pass through with no restriction, while the dam controls how much water can flow, being more limiting while also offering many benefits (e.g. preventing / reducing the impact of floods)
This is similar to permissive licenses letting any project, open-source or not, utilise their code with no real restriction aside from an attribution requirement for some licenses, while copyleft licenses add additional restrictions, like a dam, that aims to support the open-source movement.
sbeak@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
Both permissive and copyleft licenses have their place, just as how not all rivers need to have dams. And either are better than the closed proprietary licenses, which in this analogy would probably be a still, perhaps frozen, lake not connected to any other rivers, as the code cannot be redistributed or modified legally.