Don't fall for this trap! GrapheneOS leadership is very against Copyleft, probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors, and copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all. Proprietary software can be kept secret, and only shared as a binary, but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
It's not perfect, and the terms are far too long, but we do want to keep it. Reduce it to 20 years and we'd be golden.
> GrapheneOS leadership is very against Copyleft
We use GPLv2 licensing for substantial portions of our code beyond our Linux kernel changes. Vanadium is licensed as GPLv2. As long as copyright exists then there's a place for copyleft to counter it.
> probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors
That's a strange thing to claim about Proton and Cape. Those are the only companies we're aware of sending us any substantial monetary donations in the past couple years. It has several $10k donations from Proton and maybe around 10x that for Cape which sells phones with GrapheneOS for a $50 fee.
We have a list of formal sponsors at https://grapheneos.org/sponsors which are 4 server companies sponsoring dedicated servers, a GeoIP database company giving us sponsored access to the downloadable database and a VPN company sponsoring 2 DataPacket servers. We could list Cape too but they started donating to us on their own.
> copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all
What does it protect it from? GPL is widely violated with minimal consequences. The main impact is that a lot of Android OEMs and similar companies release Linux kernel drivers as open source while the firmware and userspace drivers are closed source.
> Proprietary software can be kept secret
The source code can be kept secret but not the code running on the device. That can be reverse engineered and forked. If copyright was abolished, it would be legal to fork closed source software. That's becoming far easier to do from a technical perspective.
> We have a list of formal sponsors at https://grapheneos.org/sponsors which are 4 server companies sponsoring dedicated servers, a GeoIP database company giving us sponsored access to the downloadable database and a VPN company sponsoring 2 DataPacket servers. We could list Cape too but they started donating to us on their own.
Where are the details about any arrangements with the Motorola partnership?
Motorola Mobility (Lenovo) isn't providing us with funding. They're improving the updates and security features for their devices, providing what we need to support them with proper updates and helping with the GrapheneOS port.
> Motorola Mobility (Lenovo) isn't providing us with funding.
If you made a strong public commitment to making sure everything in GrapheneOS was strong copyleft, would they still partner with you?
(FWIW, I think it's great what you're doing with the project, but I want to see the work made indelible, and I personally believe copyleft would help with that, otherwise some big vendor can have their proprietary fork and us users lose out.)
> but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
Can you elaborate on that? I have done a lot of open source (professionally and in my free time), and I don't see it.
I have exactly one example where I see that copyleft is useful, and that's Linux: it is nice to be able to get the downstream kernel. I genuinely don't have another example.
For smaller projects (even not that small actually), my feeling is that a Copyleft licence is just an opportunity for a competing project to come with a permissive licence. It happened to me in a library I built: people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it.
An example of a not-so-small project I have is Ardupilot: as a user I love that GPLv3 should make it possible for me to access (and reflash!) it, but it seems to me that the GPLv3 was clearly an opportunity for PX4 to gain traction (Ardupilot even got evicted from Dronecode).
So yeah, I totally understand the appeal of copyleft in theory, but in practice I'm a bit more skeptical. And I say that as someone who actually licences my projects as copyleft.
> people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it
Just because you choose copyleft (even weak copyleft like MPLv2) doesn't mean your project will succeed or be more popular. A lot of people (and especially a lot of companies) do prefer permissive over copyleft, and that's because they can built something proprietary on top, without being forced to give back. That's why they're ultra billionaire rich, and in comparison you're poor.
Software often wins because it's better. Copyleft favours the collective good, permissive favours the individual greed. In any case, all of these things require copyright law.
> Software often wins because it's better
I like how you so easily dismiss my opinion by saying "it's probably because you suck" :-).
For my library, people explicitly complained about copyleft, saying "it comes with strings attached". They were pushing for permissive because it meant they could fork it for their proprietary startups.
For the other example that you conveniently ignored (Ardupilot vs PX4), it's also very clear that many companies choose PX4 because of the licence. I have heard a lot of "if you go for Ardupilot it's risky because GPLv3", and believe it or not, it has an impact on people's decision long before they can say whether PX4 or Ardupilot is better (spoiler: they are roughly equivalent).
What’s the issue? They didn’t like your licence terms, and rewrote the library under a permissive licence? You don’t have a right to users or an audience.
I agree with that, I never said that was the issue. If you read my message, I answered to:
> but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law
I was merely asking them to elaborate on that, because IMHO, copyright law doesn't protect copyleft licences much (I mentioned people going for or rewriting permissive alternatives, which is now a whole lot easier with LLMs), and copyright is not protecting permissive licences at all.
I have been in companies that distributed hundreds of copyleft and permissive binaries without mentioning them. Copyright says that "in theory, it was illegal". In practice, nobody cares.
I see value in open source, but I don't think that copyright is the only thing protecting it.
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> Proprietary software can be kept secret, and only shared as a binary
That doesn't stop piracy at all so I think copyright is what prevents proliferation of piracy not secrecy.
That's not true. Look at their FAQ [1]:
> GrapheneOS is permissively licensed and is usable for building devices with an immutable root of trust. GPLv3 is deliberately incompatible with these kinds of locked down devices, unlike GPLv2 code such as the Linux kernel. This means GrapheneOS can't include GPLv3 code without forbidding use cases we want to support. GPLv3 is no problem for our own usage, but we don't want to forbid using GrapheneOS as a replacement for the Android Open Source Project in locked down devices.
They're not against GPLv3 and, but they explain why it's not suited for a project like GrapheneOS.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#:~:text=In%20some%20cases,locked%...
I don't agree. Free software would still be free even if copyright were to be abolished, if anything it would flourish further. That is because even proprietary software could be better integrated.
You're conflating what "Free Software" means and what Copyleft means. In any case, they both need protection from people like you who want to take it and benefit for free, without having to give anything back. Copyleft was designed specifically to prevent against people with your mindset. Permissively licensed software needs copyright to protect authorship rules, although the requirements are lessened.
I think the troubling mindset is that of who accuses strangers on the internet of misbehaving without knowing their opinions.
Software doesn't need any protection. People want protection.
> Software doesn't need any protection. People want protection.
Correct, people want protection for the hard labour they put into doing something good (writing software) for the world, and to not have it co-opted for individual profit over communal profit.