>People are motivated not only by a sense of purpose and the desire to contribute to something greater, but also by improving their lot in life and that of their families and heirs (read: capitalism). Copyleft ignores the latter while assuming the former will make everything ok.

This is a bit of a tricky sentence, because it's clear that capitalism isn't simply the motivation to improve your lot in life, since this was around since before capitalism. The idea that "copyleft" ignores the desire to improve one's lot in life is silly. Much more often (though not even necessarily) it's individuals themselves who would rather give something to the world (and make sure it keeps giving to the world if it's something good) - and they choose a license accordingly. It's also strange to me that while it's less likely the most ardent capitalist supports the GPL or copyleft licenses, Richard Stallman is something of a little-L libertarian himself. In fact, he views software freedom as an important freedom like freedom of speech is, to be counted among the liberal ideas that the bourgeois (capitalist) revolution ushered in. Copyleft-as-freedom (in the sense that a freedom cannot be exercised to remove the freedom of others) is spiritually just as much of a 'capitalist' ideal as permissive licensing is, and the distinction can't be reduced down to the more modern dichotomy of positive and negative liberties, since even in terms of software, the content of the freedom can be framed in terms of either.

>The community licenses fall in exactly the same boat. They’re open, free to use and contribute to, as long as you follow the set of rules and restrictions. Whether they are open source is a boring semantic argument. If you claim they are not, then copyleft licenses aren’t either, unless you’re actually a crusader. If that’s you, I recommend having some whiskey ready for when the cruel realities of life come crashing down.

This is my main disagreement with the author. By brushing aside discussion of whether something is 'open source' as a mere semantic argument, he's of the idea that the principle can be abstracted away from the software. But in the case of open source software, I'm an essentialist; open source software is essentially open source, and in this Platonic sense is how I understand open source to be, just as an idealist might understand pears, apples and oranges to be part of something supersensibly real - fruit, not merely a mental idea.

The issue that people (like me) take with "community licenses" isn't that they have restrictions, it's that the restrictions are fundamentally at odds with what open source (or "free" or whatever other term you'd like to use for the essence of this software which would be well represented by a random aliquot of Github to be representative of the class). The author has tricked us - "open, free to use and contribute to" misses out a massive component of what we consider free software (including copyleft licenses) to be.

To me (YMMV) free software contains the hope for a better world, one which may be incompatible with this one. The talk of monetization and creating a 'business' around it has come about very naturally in the trend of commodification. Many people are (justifiably) upset because open source like houses or art now faces an internal contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, and it must do, in order to survive in a world dominated by capital, in which between 8 to 12 hours of our days are shifted towards those activities which produce exchange value away from those that don't.