> Linux became popular because of the persistent effort of Linus & the Linux community into making the kernel better, not because of copyleft.

Not at all. It was born thanks to Linus, but it exploded in popularity and gained its contributorship precisely thanks to the promise of GPL that volunteer work will remain for public benefit.

Without the ability to say that, a corporate entity could have taken volunteer work so far, built a closed-source solution on top of it, and ran with it commercially, with no repercussions and with great results.

In fact, we have just that example at hand: Apple. There’s a reason Linux distros are much more popular than BSD, nearly rivaling commercial systems on desktop and far surpassing them in the server world.

> The existence of copyleft is the result of being forced to live within the domain of copyright

Sure, and by that logic the existence of copyright is the result of being forced to live within the current socioeconomic reality.

The existence of copyright hinges on existence of property in general and intellectual property in particular. To eschew that is to propose a stark foundational change to society.

Sure, if we imagine a world where there’s no corporations hiding the source from users, everything belongs to everyone, no one is recognized for their work or has any control over it, etc., we can say that copyright is non-essential. There will be many questions to that reality, of course (for example, what would drive innovation in that world, if not the motivation for recognition and profit), but it has a right to be considered as a thought experiment. It could even be more desirable than the reality we live in!

However, we don’t live in that reality, and what people tend to mean when they propose getting rid of copyright is a half measure—a reality which has nothing in common with the above, which is all the same as now, except with copyright protections removed. Those protections used to be a hindrance to pirates, but now with the advent of LLMs are a massive issue for corporate interests building their new empires on top of our original work.

You yourself then proceed to argue that terms should be limited—as if I would disagree with that!