this post was submitted on 09 May 2022
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If a company had money to "bribe" why wouldn't they just pay off the original creators for a license change? Or make their own version of the gpl codebase?
It's not the 90s anymore, the majority of new software is released under permissive licensing. And companies are more willing to upstream their code, regardless of license.
That can get expensive. If the companies could systematically subvert copyleft licenses; then they wouldn't have to bribe each creator for a license change.
OK. It's the 2020s and it's still relevant.
Permissive licensing is still flawed; because it allows companies to remove the freedoms set by the license and not contribute to the original project. The Amazon-Elastisearch scandal is a modern example of abusing permissive licenses.^[Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing]^[Amazon responds to Elastic changing its open-source software license, SDTimes]
If you want a time-relevant example, Microsoft's 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish' tactic preyed on noncopyleft programs by copying the standard and then adding proprietary features to lock people out of it.^[The Microsoft Monopoly, The Science Elf] Copyleft is designed to prevent this tactic from working.
Open-source is an irrelevant topic here. I am debating about copyleft licenses, not open-source licenses.