All copyleft really is a cost. "I will give you the fruits of my labor, but in exchange, you must share your enhancements on the same terms."
Being able to see the source isn't very useful at all, at least if you do something significant with it. You can pretty easily access Windows source code, but doing so "taints" you with NDAs and other hooks that potentially make it difficult for you to apply whatever you learned in your own products.
Saying that things like the GPL are silly because complying with it brings you some short-term angst is a really short-term thought pattern.
People bitch about GPL in Linux because of things like ZFS and graphics drivers. But without GPL, who is to say that you would be able to actually build a operating system that supports as broad an array of hardware and features as linux does?
All copyleft really is a cost. "I will give you the fruits of my labor, but in exchange, you must share your enhancements on the same terms."
I'd re-word it as "in exchange, if you share your enhancements, you must do so on the same terms". Because lots of people think that if you modify for your personal use, or if a company modifies for its own internal use, they must share those changes, which is not true.
Being able to see the source isn't very useful at all, at least if you do something significant with it. You can pretty easily access Windows source code, but doing so "taints" you with NDAs and other hooks that potentially make it difficult for you to apply whatever you learned in your own products.
Saying that things like the GPL are silly because complying with it brings you some short-term angst is a really short-term thought pattern.
People bitch about GPL in Linux because of things like ZFS and graphics drivers. But without GPL, who is to say that you would be able to actually build a operating system that supports as broad an array of hardware and features as linux does?