72 lines
4.8 KiB
Markdown
72 lines
4.8 KiB
Markdown
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It is no secret that I strongly believe in copyleft licenses like the GNU
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General Public License (often shortened to GNU GPL or GPL) and the Mozilla
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Public License (MPL). Copyleft licenses as the name implies are the opposite
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of copyright licenses. With copyleft licenses, the user has the freedom to
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modify, study and distribute the software and source code. But unfortunately
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in recent years copyleft licenses have fallen out of favor thanks to tech
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companies like Microsoft heavily pushing too permissive licenses to developers.
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These licenses (which I will call 'cuck licenses' from now on) rob developers
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of their work. Now, it should probably be noted that I am not a lawyer, nor am
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I more experienced in any legal system that most people. I'm just here to
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talk about the best software license today.
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With cuck licenses, the developer writes the code and puts it out on the
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internet like usual. The difference is there is nothing that prevents anyone
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from forking it and changing the license. You might ask why this matters.
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It matters because big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nvidia,
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Meta, and many more will take these free software projects, change the license
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to a nonfree license and no longer distribute the source code for the software.
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Most of these cuck licenses **only** require that the license notice is kept in
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every piece of code. However you're only distributing a binary though, the license
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isn't noticeable anyway.
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I'm sure you can tell by now, but tech companies LOVE cuck licensers, because cuck
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licensers do the work for them and for free. The companies then just steal that
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source code and make their own proprietary variant. No attribution, no money,
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nothing. Some developer writes the code for free and a big tech company will steal
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it and make a nonfree spyware variant of it. When tech companies write software,
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they will usually license their own software too under the BSD licenses or more
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commonly, the MIT license. The MIT license is probably one of the worst
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licenses out there in terms of stripping the developer of his/her freedom. The
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user still has the freedom to use, study and modify the software. That is,
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until a tech company forks the project and changes the license to a nonfree one.
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An example of a bad case of cuck licensing is MINIX, a portable UNIX like
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operating system. Because this project is cuck licensed, Intel decided to fork
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the project, apply some spyware modifications to it and relicense it under a
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proprietary license so no one knows what the code really does. Now all Intel users
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have this backdoor in their computer in what's called the Intel Management
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Engine (ME). Or take Google Chrome. Google forked the Webkit engine and made their
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own web engine called Blink. The Chromium browser which implements this engine
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is free software, but Google Chrome (which is very similar) is a nonfree program
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which does god knows what.
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But you, the developer can fight back against this by licensing your software under
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a copyleft license. Copyleft licenses *usually* require that the forked software is
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licensed under the same license. So if you license your software under the GNU
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General Public License version 3, all copies of the software including forks are
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going to be licensed under that same license. This is great for developers
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because their code is always used for free software and not nonfree software.
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It's also great for users, as it means there will be less nonfree software to
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use and more free software to use instead.
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I should note that I switched all software I've written from scratch to the
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GNU General Public License version 3 about a year ago or so from the MIT license
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and it gives me more freedom, and it also means everyone who uses my software or
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forks of my software is guaranteed freedom. It's a win for everybody, and it
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means together we're working towards a more free computing experience for everyone.
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It has its flaws though, which is why some may consider the LGPL or Lesser General
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Public License. This license unlike the regular GPL allows embedding the software
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in proprietary programs. This may actually be preferable in some cases, but in
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general you should stick to the regular GPL. I know there are more licenses than
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the GPL and MPL, but I'm not going to get into license specifics too much here.
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I'm mainly talking about the GPL because that's what I
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license all my software under.
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Conclusion then. Cuck licensers write the software for big tech companies for free.
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They get nothing in return and users get a piece of crap proprietary program when
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the big company forks the originally free software program. With copyleft licenses
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on the other hand, the user is guaranteed the freedom to modify, study and distribute
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the source code or program. Switch to the GNU GPL today or any of the other GPL
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compatible copyleft licenses and truly become a free software computer programmer.
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