Copyleft: the backfiring monkey patch

When the FSF came up with copyleft in the eighties it was meant as a hack or monkey patch for a broken legal landscape, not as a vindication or celebration of that landscape. The real goal was for copyright reform so that all software would be fixable and sharable by those who had it. Copyleft was a temp fix, a spiderplant-like self-nurturing, self-spreading solution for the world of floppies and tapes. In the network era with SaaS and library linking we’ve seen that copyleft is nearly as bad as the permissive license. The most proprietary services in the world all are built on a mountain of free software; much of it permissive but quite a lot of it copylefted, too. And they are using it for weapons, advertising, and baby-shredding devices. There’s nothing a copyright license can do about that, you’d need some sorta contract or I dunno… wider-reaching legislative regulatory change that make actual bad things actually illegal. Now that we’ve lost the “downhill battle”, it seems in…

Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town