this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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You think that a license that imposes more restrictions on its use is more free than one that imposes fewer???
Where my
Apache-2.0gang at?This argument reminds me of the Tolerance Paradox described by Karl Popper, who stated that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
In the licensing context, yes, the Apache and Expat licenses may grant your users the freedom to create proprietary software out of your works, but at the cost of sacrificing all the basic freedoms of all the users that will use the derived non-free product.
So, like Popper said that you should prefer removing the "smaller" freedom for a society of being intolerant in order to guarantee the "greater" one of remaining tolerant in the future, since you still have to choose which freedoms you are going to negate, it's preferable to use copyleft and impede the "smaller" freedom of creating proprietary software than not using it and allowing the crushing of future users' fundamental rights.
I don’t think it applies at all. The basis for the tolerance paradox is that intolerance harms others. While using permissively-licensed software in proprietary products certainly omits benefits to others, it can hardly be argued to be harmful.
In other words, the intolerance paradox relies on people agreeing that “harming others is always evil”. While applying it to copy-left relies on people agreeing that “non-reciprocity of good is always evil”. I’m sure some people think that way but I doubt most people would.
Well, it depends on your perspective. Copyleft licenses restrict downstream developers in order to protect the rights of downstream users.
MITboi here.