Re: The sad decline of copyleft software licenses? :(

[Pen-Yuan Hsing]

On 9/23/20 6:15 AM, Ali Reza Hayati wrote:
> > Yes, that is then not any more free software, it becomes proprietary.
>
> Yes. It becomes proprietary and proprietary software is harmful as it
> doesn't respect userfreedom.
> ......
> What we're talking about is not whether they are free or not, it's
> whether they remain free or not. Many become proprietary or be used in a
> proprietary platform against software libre community.

This reminds me of two worrying examples I recently saw where even 
GPL-licensed software are still used to create proprietary software!

1. As someone with an academic background, I've seen and used many 
statistics/analytical software. There is a proprietary statistics GUI 
program called Brodgar that uses the GPL'ed R kernel as its "backend". 
Technically, Brodgar doesn't violate the GPL because it simply sends 
commands to R and receives its output, but in my opinion it really 
exploits the GPL-licensed R in a sadly anti-social way. What's 
particularly striking is that Brodgar prominently emphasizes why it 
*doesn't* violate the GPL on its homepage:

https://www.brodgar.com/

This really left a sour taste in my mouth. I gotta admit it really 
looked to me that the developer wanted to be in my face to say: "Ha! 
Look at how I can take advantage of this GPL'ed software even though my 
program is proprietary!"

2. To my surprise, the highly proprietary messaging app WhatsApp uses 
the GPL-licensed implementation of the Signal protocol developed by Open 
Whisper Systems for its self-proclaimed end-to-end encryption:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#End-to-end_encryption

I suppose the Facebook army of lawyers were able to perform the 
necessary legal gymnastics to make a GPL program fit in their 
proprietary app, perhaps by technically keeping the GPL'ed binary 
separate from the rest of the app? (can someone more knowledgeable speak 
to this?)

My point with the above two examples is that even with GPL software, 
there are still ways people/companies who want to make proprietary 
software can exploit it. If so, permissive free software licenses are 
*even more* dangerous from the perspective of user freedom and 
strengthens the argument for copyleft licenses.

Any thoughts?