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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/pyeri on 2024-06-09 13:12:25+00:00.

I can see that the following article by DHH is doing several rounds on the Interwebs since last few days including on this very sub:

Open source is neither a community nor a democracy

What the top comment states is very much the popular opinion these days but one I strongly disagree with:

Too many people to think open source projects owe them anything. These same people always seem to “forget” that they can fork and do it themselves. Except in most cases they can’t because they’re literally incapable of doing so.

Pushing this line of thought may have some merit in it (along with several criticisms as you can see in the replies), but this line of thinking clearly benefits the businesses who often keep profiting by closing in source code of permissive licenses like Apache and MIT, and turning them into proprietary walled garden software.

While there is some disagreement between permissive and copyleft folks regarding the definition or meaning of software freedom itself, we must tilt our focus towards copyleft licenses considering the state of technology and times we live in. Consider that most popular software we happen to use today are privacy invasive walled gardens, things like right to repair and freedom to even fully own the software you pay for has been gradually eroded over the past decade. As we speak, the most popular browser of our times is about to bring a major manifest version change next month with the sole objective of restricting its users’ ability to block ads. In times like these, it makes more sense to re-license your FOSS projects under GPL/LGPL and not permissive ones.

All the copyleft licenses require you to do is NOT close the “loop” and keep your downstream distributions also open under GPL/LGPL. In that sense, I think copyleft licenses are way more open source than the so called open source or permissive licenses themselves!