In the 1980s and 1990s, when the GPL was written, the enemy of the free software movement was Microsoft and other companies that sold closed-source (“proprietary”) software. The GPL intended to disrupt this business model for two main reasons:
1. Closed-source software cannot easily be modified by users; you can take it or leave it, but you cannot adapt it to your own needs. To counteract this, the GPL was designed to force companies to release the source code of their software, so that users of the software could study it, modify it, compile and use their modified version, and thus have the freedom to customise their computing devices to their needs.
2. Moreover, GPL was motivated by a desire for fairness: if you write some software in your spare time and release it for free, it’s understandable that you don’t want others to profit from your work without giving something back to the community. Forcing derivative works to be open source ensures at least some baseline of “giving back”.
While this made sense in 1990, I think the world has changed, and closed-source software is no longer the main problem. In the 2020s, the enemy of freedom in computing is cloud software (aka software as a service/SaaS, aka web apps) – i.e. software that runs primarily on the vendor’s servers, with all your data also stored on those servers. Examples include Google Docs, Trello, Slack, Figma, Notion, and many others.
Copyleft software licenses are a legal tool that attempts to force more software vendors to release their source code. In particular, the AGPL is an attempt to force providers of cloud services to release the source of their server-side software. However, this hasn’t really worked: most vendors of cloud software simply refuse to use AGPL-licensed software, and either use a different implementation with a more permissive license, or re-implement the necessary functionality themselves, or buy a commercial license that comes without the copyleft clauses. I don’t think the license has caused any source code to become available that wouldn’t have been open source anyway.
As a legal tool to promote greater software freedom, I believe copyleft software licenses have largely failed, since they have done nothing to stop the rise of cloud software, and probably not done much to increase the share of software whose source is available. Open source software has become very successful, but much of this success is in projects with non-copyleft licenses (e.g. Apache, MIT, or BSD licenses), and even in the GPL-licensed projects (e.g. Linux) I am skeptical that the copyleft aspect was really an important factor in the project’s success.
Open source software has been tremendously successful, and it has come a long way since the origins of the free software movement born from 1990s anti-Microsoft sentiment. I will acknowledge that the FSF was instrumental in getting this all started. However, 30 years on, the ecosystem has changed, but the FSF has failed to keep up, and has become more and more out of touch. It has failed to establish a coherent response to cloud software and other recent threats to software freedom, and it just continues to rehash tired old arguments from decades ago. Now, by reinstating Stallman and dismissing the concerns about him, the FSF is actively harming the cause of free software. We must distance ourselves from the FSF and their worldview.
For all these reasons, I think it no longer makes sense to cling on to the GPL and copyleft. Let them go. Instead, I would encourage you to adopt a permissive license for your projects (e.g. MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0), and then focus your energies on the things that will really make a difference to software freedom: counteracting the monopolising effects of cloud software, developing sustainable business models that allow open source software to thrive, and pushing for regulation that prioritises the interests of software users over the interests of vendors.
https://martin.kleppmann.com/2021/04/14/goodbye-gpl.html