Copyleft has been useful
but it’s time to evolve… Read more…

Dogma

Any belief without the possibility for criticism or reform, is called dogma.
I’m asking you to find your inner calm, take a breath, and consider - for a moment - the slightest inkling of a possibility that - maybe - the principles of the copyleft license (not the philosophy) - now 40 years old - might be up for a slight tweak.

If you’re still here, thank you! 🙏
Please skip ahead to the ‘Arguments for change’ if you don’t need a refresher on what ‘copyleft’ is.

The essence of copyleft

Copyleft, as the name suggests, is a direct reaction to perceived issues around Copyright on software. After Bill Gates complained that software hobbyists were pirating his company’s intellectual property, Li-Chen Wang first used the phrase “Copyleft – all wrongs reserved” in a Tiny BASIC program, hinting at the philosophical disagreement around intellectual property rights. Richard Stallman, after being denied access to source code written by others on numerous occasions, as well as being denied access to modifications on top of his own code, formalized the idea of ‘Copyleft’ in the GNU GPL license. After that, we basically had slight variations of the same.

The central tenants of copyleft are freedom and reciprocity.

  • Freedom: Anyone can use, study, copy, modify and share work
  • Reciprocity: Everyone shares their modifications with the community

Essentially, it’s a hack on copyright law, to enforce freedom and reciprocity.

Copyleft does not equal Open Source

If you only care about freedom, use a permissive open source license. You’re then effectively allowing the possibility of open source code turning back into proprietary source. This happens regularly with projects licensed as open source under MIT/X11, BSD and Apache 2.0 licenses. When the projects grow beyond a certain size, or at a certain rate, the code - and usually the main contributors too - are scooped up by investors. So if you’re hoping your open source project will be acquired and/or aqui-hired, use that.

If you also care about reciprocity, you add additional restrictions and you’re in copyleft territory. The more restrictions you add the more ‘protective’ you are of the code being hijacked by private interests. It starts with weakly protective copyleft like LGP and MPL, and it ends with strongly protective copyleft, like (A)GPL.

Arguments for change

Copyleft is wrong in two ways:

  • Freedom is over-granted to organizations
  • Reciprocity is under-enforced

Freedom is over-granted to organizations

Thinking that organizations should have the same =rights as people is a fundamental flaw in thinking.

Copyleft was created in a context where computer companies were considered extensions of people. It was, at the time, normal to grant organizations the same freedoms as you would grant your own neighbor. Back then, your neighbor could actually have been Steve Jobs, funding Apple Computer Company by selling his VW minibus, and using his parents’ garage as a manufacturing plant.

This is what trips us up. Organizations can be small, nearly indistinguishable from the individual that runs it - or they can grow to be more powerful than an entire country, while still being yielded as a weapon by a single individual. But, however confusing, they are and never will be equal to people. For-profit organizations in particular, don’t even align with the generalized individual interest, nor that of any community of individuals. Nowadays, for-profit corporations pursue the opposite of the general interest. All they care about is the bottom line for the community of shareholders, taking the maximum and giving just the bare minimum so that customers don’t walk away, or competitors don’t jump in.

Why then, would you, in your right mind, ever grant these ‘engines of power monopolization’ the freedoms you would give your neighbor - while asking nothing in return? You’re not discriminating anyone if you set the bar higher for organizations than for people. If they see value in the community’s work - why can’t they pay for it? Because, if you don’t enforce payment - they will certainly not do it voluntarily. The little they do is for marketing purposes or their own needs, as they will never voluntarily pay for the full value they receive.

The danger the Free Software Foundation ignores: Organizations will use their ever-growing intellectual property, economies of scope, scale, network and data, to subvert the direction of free software projects to align with their interests. Nearly all contributions to the Linux kernel today come from companies that pay their developers to steer the project in their corporate favor. The very few people who have the persona of a peanut farmer in some far-away countries at heart, coding up their contributions late at night in the weekends, are no match for the army of corporate goons taking over.

Reciprocity is under-enforced

Reciprocity is under-enforced in two ways:

  • We allow Copyleft-washing with overly broad Contributor License Agreements (CLAs)
    This is proprietary software waiting to happen. While Copyleft was a hack of copyright in favour of individual freedom, CLA’s are a counter-hack by corporations in the early 2000’s by which reciprocity is undermined in the long term. Even if a company starts with AGPLv3, the most strongly protective copyleft license, if CLA’s are used, the corporation can, and will, revert to a fully proprietary license if that is what maximizes shareholder value. There are valid reasons to require copyright assurance, but for that a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) is easier to understand, implement and use for both parties, and it achieves the same effect. Anyone using a CLA in parallel to a copyleft license is copyleft-washing.
  • The trigger for reciprocity is insufficient ‘Private use’ by companies is allowed. Here we go again, just like with freedom. Companies are not people. Granting them ‘private use’ means that a corporation with 50,000 worldwide employees is allowed to modify copylefted code WITHOUT sharing back, EVER, since it is not ‘distributing’. Any individual should be able to experiment all they want in private, but the interpretation of ‘private’ should not allow corporations to hoard their improvements. The original spirit of the copyleft license is anti-hoarding.


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