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this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2026
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Permissive licenses are what everyone should strive toward. A world where we can share advancements and technologies freely with one another and innovate based on the prior work of others is a world where a shit load of cool stuff gets done. The issue arises when bad faith actors take advantage of it and act against the spirit of collaboration. The problem isn't caused by the permissive license, but by the bad actor, and the latter is what should be addressed
Well yeah, and the GPL was born exactly to preserve open source, sharing and transparency, and to fight against proprietary software
I don't disagree - I'm not saying permissive licenses are necessarily the right call today :)
I mean stealing code was always possible, nowadays with AI and apparently copyright not existing anymore, nobody enforces anything anymore. They seem to only be enforced with actual copy pasting of code, which is not a "today" thing
By "today" I dont mean "post-ai" I mean "pre-revolution"
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And how does a copyleft license get in the way of that? On the contrary, with the GPL, I can be sure that the technology and code will be freely shared. Freely as in freedom, that's the whole point.
I misunderstood your initial point, I thought you were speaking against permissive/copyleft licenses generally. We agree with one another. Except in the "I can be sure that the technology and code will be freely shared" because just as bad actors can abuse a permissive license, bad actors (see: companies with enough money to just squash the legal case) can simply ignore a copyleft license. I think we 99% agree though and I love copyleft.
You are right, but with copyleft you at least have legal mechanisms to force the company to comply with the license. With MIT or BSD there aren't any, because permissive licences don't enforce any such restrictions.
Yup. And I love copyleft too.
Those legal mechanisms do exist in theory! But, as ever, if its you vs Microsoft, you can probably get fucked :(
Permissive is the opposite of copyleft. Permissive is "here's my code, do whatever the fuck you want", copyleft is "here's my code, you may use it but if your derivative work is available to other people then I dictate how it must be licensed"
When we get classless, moneyless, stateless society then sure, we won't need licenses at all. But as long as we have a world run by lecherous corporate MBA's, we need to use the current legal system to our advantage and keep our code safe from bad-faith actors who would steal from open source. The problem is not that corporations are greedy (they very well may be) but that the current relationship between the labor of writing code and the financial incentives of selling it is controlled by those bad-faith actors. They're going to do everything they possibly can to leech off of open source and give nothing back because because it makes financial sense for them to do so, and until you change the rules of that relationship, you honestly can't really blame them for it.
I agree somewhat with the sentiment of the first half of your reply. Though I don't think that contradicts what I said. A permissive license may not be the best decision right now because you're exceedingly likely to be taken advantage of, especially as LLM scrapers trawl the web for any scrap of code they possibly can. But I still think it is what we should be striving toward, revolution included.
As for the latter half, hmm no I think I can blame them for it actually. Obviously the system (see: capitalism) is the root cause but we don't need to pretend that bad actors don't carry any blame for their actions.