The issue with the GPL is that it’s not just a license, it has become a political ideology in the software world that creates more problems than it’s worth. It ignores simple realities when it comes to software development by seeing everything that links against a GPL licensed work or calls a function in a GPL licensed work as a derived work. It becomes “infectious” for closed source software and the companies that create it, leading to legal issues and the possibility that you have to open source your software in the end.

So it’s understandable that nobody wants those headaches and the (legal) uncertainties when they try to provide closed source software to Linux users. Seeing how the GPL is used to force others to put their software under the same license, companies just stay away from it before running into a bigger problem.

Stuff like this makes you wonder if those people really have the best interests of the user and/or developer in mind. Yes, the LGPL has been created to circumvent the linking issue, but on pages like this one [1] you can clearly see how the FSF is against using the LGPL to further their agenda. They clearly state the idea behind it in the document.

And then there’s stuff like this [2] where it’s literally used as a weapon to avoid proprietary modules from interacting with GPL parts of the kernel. They even prevent the use of so called “glue code” and are also talking about other stuff that needs to be added further down the line. No wonder companies don’t touch this with even a ten foot pole.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony went with FreeBSD as the OS for the Playstation seeing stuff like that. Knowing they have to add drivers/changes to the kernel as they run on proprietary hardware it didn’t matter which kernel they’d use, but looking at the license I’m certain it wasn’t a hard choice.

Then there are things like the BusyBox lawsuits that happened in the 2000s. The license and the project have been used by the SFLC to further the FSF agenda and sue all kinds of companies into GPL compliance with settlements that contained $$. While I support to hold companies accountable for license violations, I do not support that the developers of the project are not represented, while their rights are being violated in the process.

It had become so bad that one of the developers had to put out a statement on the matter [3] because he didn’t get any work as consultant anymore, as nobody wanted to get even near this thing. In the end he heavily regretted having even started it, noting that not a single line of code was added to BusyBox through those trials, stopping the whole thing for good [4].

Once again another example that demonstrates that this is a political and ideological thing and has nothing to do with free software whatsoever. IMHO the spirit behind free software was lost in this case and it turned into a purely commercial thing and a demonstration of power w/o regard to the project or its developers. The FSF has done some shady stuff when it comes to licenses anyway so it’s understandable that this whole disaster has led to Google creating a GPL-Free userspace in Android to avoid any of those problems.

No, I won’t go into Android or the cloud and how people or even startups abuse this ideology to get tons of free labor, just to change the license later and move on. Don’t want to give anyone any ideas, but it’s another huge issue in the open source community and not GPL specific. Or is it? I mean that’s what free software is right? Anyone can use it for anything they like and if it makes them billions, so what? We don’t need the money, we do it for the fun. Am I right?

The initial idea behind the GPL was “here’s my code, have fun and please return any changes you made to me”. That’s it. Everything else was later added either in a new version of the license or by adding some form of interpretation. Leading to the above demonstrating how people are worrying more about licenses or (creating) licensing issues and how to demonstrate (political) power instead of writing code. This is one of the main reasons that holds Linux and the open source community back.

It’s also why I’m being promised for 30+ years that Linux will have it’s breakthrough on the desktop this year. If not this year, then next year for sure. As long as proprietary software is treated the way it currently is, we will never see stuff like Photoshop or Office on Linux and that’s the software you need if you really want to get a hold on the desktop.

If the community really wants to make this work they have to move away from the FSF agenda, start using licenses like the LGPL that opens the door for closed source software and start providing an ABI that is stable across distributions to allow for one binary to run on all of them w/o it being distributed in a container with its own userspace. The “evil people” from Redmond know how to do all this pretty well for over 30 years.

So keep celebrating that open source software has made it to the cloud and is running things there. Even when it is in a modified version and the cloud providers don’t have to publish the source under the GPLv3 because it technically doesn’t violate the GPLv3 (ASP loophole) while it violates the spirit behind it a 100%.

And keep celebrating that Linux is running on billions of phones, while all your rights of the GPL are taken away from you w/o technically violating it, because Google has made it so that you can watch but cannot touch w/o voiding the trust of the device and making the use of certain apps impossible.

It seems that no matter what, even with GPL, those big companies always find a way around it w/o technically violating it, but crushing its spirit making them billions in the process.

Weirdly enough the FSF doesn’t try to do anything about it. I wonder why that is...

[1] - https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html.en

[2] - https://lwn.net/Articles/860262/

[3] - https://web.archive.org/web/20110515142741/http://perens.com...

[4] - https://lwn.net/Articles/478361/