Sure, you’re factually correct. But I don’t believe licenses are the issue, just where corporations and governments are focusing their deadly ruin-stuff laser vision. I think you (and most the FOSS community) vastly overestimate how effective the legal protection is. You’re expecting companies to play by the rules THIS TIME. Once ‘big tech’ decides GPL isn’t fair, it won’t matter.
Companies like Microsoft are getting on board with Linux. Even if they can’t get away with ignoring the copyleft license entirely (which I suspect they soon will), they could definitely afford to make a legal clean-room copy of any code they want to make proprietary. Soon that proprietary code will become a necessity to do X, and bam, using any functional Linux will be back in the same boat as using Windows.
Sure, you’re factually correct. But I don’t believe licenses are the issue, just where corporations and governments are focusing their deadly ruin-stuff laser vision. I think you (and most the FOSS community) vastly overestimate how effective the legal protection is. You’re expecting companies to play by the rules THIS TIME. Once ‘big tech’ decides GPL isn’t fair, it won’t matter.
Companies like Microsoft are getting on board with Linux. Even if they can’t get away with ignoring the copyleft license entirely (which I suspect they soon will), they could definitely afford to make a legal clean-room copy of any code they want to make proprietary. Soon that proprietary code will become a necessity to do X, and bam, using any functional Linux will be back in the same boat as using Windows.