I totally get what you’re saying, and that’s a fair point. But I think I just have a different notion of freedom. To me, freedom is about the mode of production. I think people would be actually free if the very act of creating something were fulfilling on its own because of its creative manner. In that case you wouldn’t need anything in exhange, and distributing your work for free wouldn’t be a sacrifice, so there would be no problem if somebody decided to sell it. Now I know the areas where you can achieve anything serious that way are very, very limited yet, but still they exist, and I think in order for them to grow, it would be helpful to separate them from other, less creative areas of production.

So back to your analogy, allowing companies to sell your free vegetables doesn’t make sense, because farming is a tedious work, that is not fully fulfilling on its own. But allowing others to sing a song you wrote to just express your feelings - even at a paid concert with a big audience - isn’t that big of a problem. You might want money from that because you need money in general but not because writing a song was a sacrifice you want to compensate. Songs aren’t comparable to software, but with software you would also benefit if companies didn’t participate at all in its development and didn’t bring it to usual passive consumers because it would preserve its DIY manner.

But companies almost never do contribute?

Maybe compared to their passive usage, their contributions are small, but they still influence FOSS world a lot.

if your theory were true, BSD Unices would have much more contributions, better file systems, better real-time support, and much wider hardware support than Linux.

Why? I’m not saying projects would have more contributions. In fact, I realise there would be much fewer contributions which is a big downside and the reason why I called this question ambiguous in the first place. But, although my experience with BSDs is quite limited yet, I do think they are kind of “freer” than Linux (especially if you compare BSDs with most popular Linux distros)

Are you aware that software maintainers don’t have to merge the contributions these people are pushing?

Yes, I literally said that in the first line of the comment you’re replying to.

Are you saying that copyleft software is enshitififying because big companies are pushing too many (optional) contributions?

Yes. I’m not saying that always happens, but I do believe many projects enshitified a good amount because a lot of their contributors have become big companies. Or sometimes companies make an entirely new project that is enshitified from the very beginning but still gets included in other FOSS projects. Both merging a contribution or including a project are optional, but since FOSS projects get involved in this whole producer-customer relations model, where everything is done centrally by the developer and served ready-to-use to passive consumers, merging those contributions kinda becomes an actual need of users. So yeah, if you dig deeper, it’s ultimately the very involvement in this commercial centralised production model and not just companies, that causes enshitification, but I still think that letting companies just fuck off and do their own centralised thing separately from decentralised DIY-like development which, to my mind, is actual freedom, might help.

It’s just rejecting your responsibility in the way you behave. “It’s not me, it’s the nature”

Bro calm down, I’m not trying to insult you. I’m sorry what I said made you so upset.

I’m not blaming the GPL of anything, I’m not saying license defines software design, I’m not proposing a solution and the whole point of my post was about the contradictory nature of the problem. You just seem to have missed my whole reasoning. Now, I don’t know why looking at the negative sides of the trade-off the GPL is making bugs you so much, but if it’s really not your thing, you should stop wasting your time on this self-contradictory mess and just be happy with GPL. Especially because I’m too small for my “corporate apologia” to be effective.

Oh boy, I got so confused when I was a beginner and some American kid told me “would of” is an alternative to “would have”

Oh wow, it’s so cool you speak Esperanto! Can you share your experience with it? Where do you use it? What good Esperanto communities are there? Do you find it actually useful? In what ways did it enrich your life?

Okay maintainers don’t have to, but they usually end up doing so as those contributions are still valuable. The key point is that even though free software is called “free”, a huge chunk of it is going through the same process of “enshitification” as proprietary software, because of being developped by companies and being a part of this corporate, non-free world. So separating that from FOSS by letting companies keep their work by themselves seems to help a little bit.

There’s no direct relation, yes, but centralisation and bloating are both things commercial software development tends to because of the nature of developper-consumer relations. And GPL forces companies to contribute their code which is often based on those principles back to the original project. So I think there is indirect relation.

To those who get upset with this post: bruh just talk to actual Ukrainians. You’ll discover many interesting things.

The funny part of propaganda is that it’s very often true - maybe exagerated but still true. People on the other side just ignore their own issues, so the truth has a shocking effect. But in actuality, if you dig deeper, you almost always end up realising both sides in every conflict do some horrible things and at the same time have good reasons for that. Because war is not about who’s right and who’s wrong, it’s about who’s gonna survive and who’s gonna become a slave or die.

And I’m even not pro-Russian.

Human nature on its deathbed when it realizes it forgot to account for Karl Marx

Oh wow, didn’t know that! Thanks

Well, for me personally the way the software is developped and designed is not something abstract. Centralisation and bloating, for example, makes understanding and developping software a significant amount more difficult which puts you in a more passive role and so making you much less free

I get your point, but what I’m talking about is actually moving away from corps in a way even more than GPL by keeping their contributions away from FOSS projects (as corps usually have no interest in open sourcing them)

The more I read replies under my post, the more I understand how little I know lol Pay for a license to monetize open source code? Which one of GPL and MIT allows that?

Interesting! I think having any code licensed under GPL could cause a cascading effect of having to open source even more code, whereas with MIT you can just stop making it open at any point

Gpl doesn’t prevent monetisation/commercialisation

Sorry, I used a wrong word there. I meant closing the source code and turning the project into a product, aiming commercial profits instead of fulfilling users’ needs.

You can also dual license

Hmm, didn’t think of it… But doesn’t it defeat the GPL’s purpose of preventing closing the source code?

There are lots of MIT projects that are carried by companies.

Okay, my experience with MIT is probably too limited, never heard of projects like that. But why do those companies publish their source code? Aren’t they loosing profits?

Anyway, my point was about projects that are started by enthusiasts and then, as they grow popular, receive a lot of contributions from companies, which (as I initially thought at least) would otherwise make them close sourced and so keep FOSS projects “clean”. But yeah if companies have a reason to keep their contributions open source even they don’t have to, I’m confused

Wow, didn’t know OpenWrt exists because of GPL. Also I like the perpetually-free vs. temporarily-free distinction Codeberg is making, it really clears things up.

Yeah, I could totally see why copyleft exists and how much we gain from using it. In fact, I use exclusively GPL for my personal projects. However, I still find it a trade-off, because having contributions from corporate-minded developpers is something I think is often bad for FOSS projects. Take all those dubious software design decisions Red Hat has made for example.

Check out Qutebrowser as well. It is much more configurable, although it is arguably much less polished

But why? What’s the purpose of creating bots that post replies in subreddits that don’t concerns politics or other topics which can be used to propagate aomething?