in my opinion, we should blame it on the BSD / MIT style licenses that require nothing from downstream.

Corporations have access to thousands of libraries at no cost and no restrictions... People in general don't appreciate things that come easy, and tend to be irresponsible towards those things.

Does the added unpaid maintenance burden worth it now, that due to choosing MIT vs GPL, hundreds of proprietary junk use your code? I don't think so.

#FreeSoftware #GPL

Fun stuff: x11-misc/albert used to be licensed #GPL. Then the maintainer decided to arbitrarily make it proprietary with a custom license ("freeware, i.e. proprietary and source available", with a limited right to redistribute binaries for specific Linux distributions). Except that the project has received some pretty large contributions before that, and the authors of these contributions hold the copyright to them. Since the contributions were made under the GPL, they cannot be incorporated into a proprietary project.

On top of everything, the maintainer has *deleted* the issue discussing the license issues, in particular the GPL violation.

https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert/blob/f9a33001e9e2930291e8d1a8669a6c43d1de2269/LICENSE.md
https://web.archive.org/web/20210225183856/https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert/issues/765
https://bugs.gentoo.org/766129

#Gentoo

Please specify license · Issue #765 · albertlauncher/albert

The Albert website says Albert is "GPL-licensed, 100% free and open source", but, as far as I can see, there is no license file or license headers or any mention of license or GPL in the ...

^GitHub

very good write up by the @conservancy and great commentary from Brodie as always.

I believe what #RedHat is doing is not against the #GPL or #FreeSoftware. For me, what's more concerning is their communication in which they position themselves as "fully committed to open source", while constantly egging on one of the four pillars of software freedom.