&gt;The fact that you consider performance and freedom to be a trade off means that you&#x27;ve already given up even the slightest hope of freedom.<p>True, mostly thanks to shitty companies like Apple, Microsoft, Autodesk, etc.<p>&gt;You as a developer and a user should want the freedoms afforded to you by the GPL or any copyleft license for that matter.<p>I do.<p>&gt;In the ideal world your high performance software would be released under the GPL you would have the best of both worlds.<p>We don&#x27;t live in an ideal world and never will.<p>&gt;The war won&#x27;t be won by rewriting every single tool and releasing it under the GPL, it will be won by pressuring existing companies to license their software under the GPL.<p>This doesn&#x27;t work, especially in software for engineering where there are often sole, hegemonic powers and established monopolies and where the cost to enter the market as a new competitor is non-trivial.  We&#x27;re not talking a desktop manager or a text editor here, we&#x27;re talking millions of dollars of R&amp;D for things like CFD suites.  Open alternatives exist (like, say, OpenFOAM) but they often lack accreditation&#x2F;certification&#x2F;rigorous testing and when you&#x27;re dealing with people&#x27;s lives the choice is often proscribed entirely.<p>&gt;The people who want non-copyleft licenses to succeed are those who which to make a profit from the control and ignorance they can impose on their users by closing their source and platform or those who are willing to trade their user&#x27;s freedoms to appease them.<p>There&#x27;s a financial incentive to creating walled gardens and proprietary software that you can charge for.<p>&gt;yet people dismiss them because the company worth hundreds of billions of dollars has a better UX.<p>When the choice is between &quot;being able to function at my job, <i>at all</i>&quot; and &quot;use free software&quot;, well, the choice is clear.