speedie-page/articles/Swedish man rants about licenses again.md

# Swedish man rants about licenses again

2023-05-23

It is no secret that I strongly believe in copyleft licenses like the GNU
General Public License (often shortened to GNU GPL or GPL) and the Mozilla
Public License (MPL). Copyleft licenses as the name implies are the opposite
of copyright licenses. With copyleft licenses, the user has the freedom to
modify, study and distribute the software and source code. But unfortunately
in recent years copyleft licenses have fallen out of favor thanks to tech
companies like Microsoft heavily pushing too permissive licenses to developers.
These licenses (which I will call 'cuck licenses' from now on) rob developers
of their work. Now, it should probably be noted that I am not a lawyer, nor am
I more experienced in any legal system that most people. I'm just here to
talk about the best software license today.

With cuck licenses, the developer writes the code and puts it out on the
internet like usual. The difference is there is nothing that prevents anyone
from forking it and changing the license. You might ask why this matters.
It matters because big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nvidia,
Meta, and many more will take these free software projects, change the license
to a nonfree license and no longer distribute the source code for the software.
Most of these cuck licenses **only** require that the license notice is kept in
every piece of code. However you're only distributing a binary though, the license
isn't noticeable anyway.

I'm sure you can tell by now, but tech companies LOVE cuck licensers, because cuck
licensers do the work for them and for free. The companies then just steal that
source code and make their own proprietary variant. No attribution, no money,
nothing. Some developer writes the code for free and a big tech company will steal
it and make a nonfree spyware variant of it. When tech companies write software,
they will usually license their own software too under the BSD licenses or more
commonly, the MIT license. The MIT license is probably one of the worst
licenses out there in terms of stripping the developer of his/her freedom. The
user still has the freedom to use, study and modify the software. That is,
until a tech company forks the project and changes the license to a nonfree one.

An example of a bad case of cuck licensing is MINIX, a portable UNIX like
operating system. Because this project is cuck licensed, Intel decided to fork
the project, apply some spyware modifications to it and relicense it under a
proprietary license so no one knows what the code really does. Now all Intel users
have this backdoor in their computer in what's called the Intel Management
Engine (ME). Or take Google Chrome. Google forked the Webkit engine and made their
own web engine called Blink. The Chromium browser which implements this engine
is free software, but Google Chrome (which is very similar) is a nonfree program
which does god knows what.

But you, the developer can fight back against this by licensing your software under
a copyleft license. Copyleft licenses *usually* require that the forked software is
licensed under the same license. So if you license your software under the GNU
General Public License version 3, all copies of the software including forks are
going to be licensed under that same license. This is great for developers
because their code is always used for free software and not nonfree software.
It's also great for users, as it means there will be less nonfree software to
use and more free software to use instead.

I should note that I switched all software I've written from scratch to the
GNU General Public License version 3 about a year ago or so from the MIT license
and it gives me more freedom, and it also means everyone who uses my software or
forks of my software is guaranteed freedom. It's a win for everybody, and it
means together we're working towards a more free computing experience for everyone.
It has its flaws though, which is why some may consider the LGPL or Lesser General
Public License. This license unlike the regular GPL allows embedding the software
in proprietary programs. This may actually be preferable in some cases, but in
general you should stick to the regular GPL. I know there are more licenses than
the GPL and MPL, but I'm not going to get into license specifics too much here.
I'm mainly talking about the GPL because that's what I
license all my software under.

Conclusion then. Cuck licensers write the software for big tech companies for free.
They get nothing in return and users get a piece of crap proprietary program when
the big company forks the originally free software program. With copyleft licenses
on the other hand, the user is guaranteed the freedom to modify, study and distribute
the source code or program. Switch to the GNU GPL today or any of the other GPL
compatible copyleft licenses and truly become a free software computer programmer.