> 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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