To quote julia reda:
“Because a large company — namely GitHub’s parent company Microsoft — profits from analyzing free software and builds a commercial service on it, the idea of using copyright law to prohibit Microsoft from doing say may seem obvious to copyleft enthusiasts,” she wrote. “However, by doing so, the copyleft scene is essentially demanding an extension of copyright to actions that have for good reason not been covered by copyright. These extensions would have fatal consequences for the very open culture which copyleft licenses seek to promote.”
Honestly, I don’t care if technically/legally Github doesn’t violate GPL copyright with Copilot. Whether or not it’s legal, I don’t think what they’re doing with Copilot should be allowed.
Fatal consequences for the very open culture which copyleft licenses seek to promote.
Copyleft licenses being a little less free beats them being completely defenseless against private corporations attempting to reap the benefits of the open source community for themselves at the expense of that same community.
Copyleft licenses being a little less free beats them being completely defenseless against private corporations attempting to reap the benefits of the open source community for themselves at the expense of that same community.
I think this is the typical confusion I have seen somewhere.
Freedom is not about the options but the possibility to reach each option.
If one of the options allow to close the source code, that option could avoid you to reach the rest of options.
This is the reason why a BSD or MIT license doesn’t provide more freedom, just more options.
The AGPL and GPL, however, ensure these possibilities.
In every case, however, if you are the only copyright holder, you can close the source code, but that is different to the case in which this is allowed for everyone.
