this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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The community doesn’t put food on the table. Money does.
That’s my somewhat cynical take on it. The reality is that for anything other than hobby projects, devs need to be paid.
If I’m running a large corp, there are several legitimate (capitalist) reasons to use and develop some stuff in the open:
But at some point, money needs to come in. That means I need to have an edge, somewhere. GPL is a risk to that edge, especially GPL3. Now, the actual edge simply might just be ”yeah, we are really good at this, give us money and we’ll help you”, or it’s a proprietary extension to something.
For most open source projects, the devs are mostly full time and paid somehow. Basically, if we want copyleft licenses, fork up the gold.
You say that companies can ”steal” the efforts. Sure, but the alternative isn’t copyleft, the alternative is that the funding goes to proprietary code, unless the existing hobby project is ”captive” enough (e.g. Linux).
I would love to change this, but that would require massive pubic funding of open source projects. Personally, I think governments should slowly migrate to open source and transfer whatever they save on licensing over to open source funding. In my opinion, any model for sustainable open source must include a funding model before I can take it seriously, and most of the copyleft movement simply doesn’t want to take funding seriously.