Me too. I also find three iterations of the same subject not enough discourse. We need to take this matter more seriously.
> But it has made me realize why I instinctively dislike Free Software as a movement.
On the other hand, this whole discourse reminds me why I absolutely love Free Software as a movement.
> Copyright and licensing are bad, actually.
This is why we have "Copyleft".
> Stop getting into a frenzy of arousal about the police kicking down doors to drag Billy Gates to jail because 80 characters of fast square root is theft but 79 isn't.
And, stop getting into frenzy of arousal about being able to use any and every code piece you see elsewhere in any project regardless of its license.
> Where on earth is the ambition and vision!? Knowledge is public domain. A commons of knowledge is a public good. The cost of code copying is zero.
This is why GPL is important. It forces knowledge to evolve in the open, stay in the public domain and help it actually makes public good. It also doesn't hinder ambition and vision by not taking it to private domain, and keeping it open to everyone.
> Sure in our day job we have to pretend to care about this stuff. But when did the ideological scope of what can be achieved become rules lawyering over license text.
You might be pretending to care about this in your daily job, but we really care. Some of the projects I take part can't ever include GPL code (because the projects are MIT licensed). These texts are court-tested licenses, so they're as proper and serious agreements as the EULAs of "particular" software companies.
> Copy my MIT licensed code without attribution? I don't give a shit, go ahead, I hope it helps, in fact I want a truly public domain license but copyright law is so hostage to corporate interests no such thing exists in many countries.
If I want my code to be copied and possibly closed, I'll license it with MIT or BSD-0 and forget about it, but if I'm licensing my code with GPL3, it means I want that code to stay open. As a license, I expect anyone using that code to respect that license.
> Free the code.
Yes, and respect the license the author selected for his/her code.
