Post #4244071

Thinking about earlier days of free software, I guess GPL was designed for a world where you might get a program on tape, floppy disk, or downloaded from a local BBS (probably historically inaccurate, but stay with me..). You might have an address to write to a human to get the source code off them, or find them and ask for it in-person. I guess the code would move slowly, getting improved in different ways depending on the community it reached. In the corporate internet days, almost everything goes through a huge massively centralised, closed source (!) Microsoft AI platform, constantly scraped and IP washed by extractive bots, that's a totally different prospect and completely changes the meaning of the license, and sometimes feels like it makes the whole process of sharing feel inhumane. I'm now thinking about no longer uploading copyleft source code to codeberg etc as well as github, only sharing it at workshops/with friends, and asking others to do the same. Maybe this could be part of the license, but could just be an unwritten social contract.