Well, GPL is about *freedom for the users*, not necessarily for the developers.

goodpoint · on April 21, 2021

Every developer is also an user.

And "user" freedom is more important because we use tenths of millions of SLOC and do development work on a small fraction.

tremon · on April 21, 2021

The copyright holder is never a user in a discussion about distribution rights, though.

goodpoint · on April 21, 2021

...in a very narrow sense where one person or organization owns all the copyright on a codebase.

This can be true for a small program on a microcontroller, but 99.9% of FOSS is deployed as part of a big ecosystem.

For each line of code I deploy on production there's 1000 lines of kernel, libraries, daemons, firmware.

As developers, we are 0.1% developers and 99.9% users.

moron4hire · on April 21, 2021

How does freedom for the user-who-is-not-a-developer to change the source work, then? The FSF fundamentally assumes the user is a developer. Hell, look at the vast majority of the GNU software. I wouldn't say it's at all targeted at not-developer users.

erik_seaberg · on April 21, 2021

The user could hire any developer, he doesn't have to live within the original author's roadmap.