Free Software: An idea whose time has passed?
Does anybody who had time to read the whole thing have a concise summary? From the parts I skimmed it sounds like the author is annoyed by the politics of the FSF. I&#x27;ve heard this argument many times before and in my experience it usually comes from people who only have a superficial understanding of how the GPL actually works. Often this happens as a result of learning what the little they do know from their corporate legal team not from actual software engineers writing free software. &quot;The GPL is politics and inherently incompatible with venture _capitalism_.&quot; The GPL puts users first. Good capitalism does that too.<p>On top of that, the only time I hear people actually complain about free software is if they&#x27;re trying to incorporate it into their product and don&#x27;t have the authority to make the business&#x2F;product call to not worry about the secrecy of their source code (or don&#x27;t want to). Essentially, they don&#x27;t respect the license&#x2F;ethos and just want to use other software for free not with user freedom in mind.<p>Here&#x27;s why you use free software:<p>1. You are building a product where user freedom is important.
2. You don&#x27;t want a large company to take your software and use their vast resources to pump out improvements and usurp your position in the market (AGPL).
3. You want to mutually benefit from others using your software in a more tangible way than &quot;can I have money look I have github stars&quot;.
4. You want to assert your patent position and ensure that nobody can ever lock you out of your product by patenting a derivative work.<p>Here&#x27;s when free software is annoying:<p>1. If you&#x27;re trying to make money off commodity software (or talent).
2. If your lawyers aren&#x27;t familiar with how the world writes software and insist that everything your engineers output is a trade secret and will bolster your software portfolio in the event of acquisition (don&#x27;t work for these companies).<p>I&#x27;ve also commonly heard the myth that using the GPL slashes your company&#x27;s value. In the instances where that&#x27;s happened, the people who let it happen got taken, or they didn&#x27;t do their diligence and let the GPL slip into their product when their whole strategy was keeping their source secret and then look like fools and direct their anger at the GPL.<p>Another thing people don&#x27;t often realize is that as the original copyright holder, you have permission to dual license your work as you see fit. If you&#x27;re say an enterprise company and trying to woo a big client and they just can&#x27;t stomach the GPL, then you can choose to license it to them under terms they&#x27;re willing to work with, if that makes sense for your business. Honestly I think this puts the company that owns the software in a pretty powerful position &quot;oh you like our product but want special treatment, well that&#x27;s going to cost some $$$&quot;.<p>If Free Software is dead you&#x27;d think the linux kernel would be dead, Signal would be dead, etc.