Ideological(ish) movements don't succeed by converting everyone absolutely, they do it by changing the narrative in their direction. Stallman has absolutely done that.
But answering the “it failed”. Not really. It exists and is a choice on most license dropdowns and is a famous one.
People should really default to GPL rather than more permissive licenses and hot take… should also default to closed source. And make open source or non GPL a conscious choice.
The reason is GPL gives you more ability to commercialise since it gives you the copyright holder more of an edge over let’s say Amazon Inc who has decided to accept your license to bundle it with a cloud service and extend it. They are obliged to release their source code to their customers.
That Ballmer called it a cancer is a great accolade.
Close source as a default because it is a one way door publishing the code on the open web. So you are protecting your own interests. You owe the “open source community” nothing and should exploit your IP as much as anyone else, and use GPL to allow people to “fix the printer” if they need to.
> The reason is GPL gives you more ability to commercialise since it gives you the copyright holder more of an edge over let’s say Amazon Inc who has decided to accept your license to bundle it with a cloud service and extend it. They are obliged to release their source code to their customers.
Not if it's GPLv2 or non-AGPL - and even then what you're describing is the opposite of the underdog-moral-problem a lot of smaller cloud services or database/infrastructure providers are facing whereby Amazon (et al.) simply offers your product or service as their service, which is allowed by all versions of the GPL because Amazon doesn't care about the source-code: they care about charging a premium for access to a hot open-source project without contributing anything back to the actual project maintainers. That's (unfortunately) an argument for going closed-source, or at least having to reserve copyrights/licenses for operating the software as a service for another company.
I imagine it's like being Sherlocked by Apple, except Apple was using your work all-along.
