Second, if copyright is being laundered away we can get increasingly clever with how we liberate proprietary software. Today, decompiling and reverse engineering is a labor intensive process. That's the whole point of "open source" - that working in source is easier than working in bytecode. Given the hockey-stick of innovation happening in AI right now, I'd be surprised if we don't see AI assisted disassembly happening in the next decade. If you can go from bytecode to source code, that unlocks a lot. Even more so if you can go from bytecode to source code and feed that into a NN to liberate the code from its original license.
What I think GP is getting at in my understanding is that all this OSS/licensing stuff was a cautious attempt to assert a radical idea into an atmosphere of extrem secrecy: That information wants to be free.
Now we have a fat cooperation making a public statement of putting the value of advancing humanity over the value of honoring weird old Victorian ideas of "intellectual property" - which is what we are always tried to do, no?
Not that there is nothing to criticize, but I think that's a good thing on the whole.
Information may want to be free, but users of free information often want to enrich their private endeavors by shackling the information that was given to them freely.
The (A|L)GPL acknowledges the fact that some people and corporations like to use free-and-gratis work in their products and not reciprocate the courtesy shown to them by the authors of that work. (I choose the (L)GPL whenever I can so that folks who derive from my work are either required to either make it available as I have, or pay me enough so that I don't mind them shackling my work.)
The BSD license acknowledges the fact that some people and many corporations like to use gratis work in their closed-source products and never even do so much as bother to credit the authors of work that they used.
For as long as powerful folks continue to use and improve upon gratis information and software without contributing the products that used that information and/or improvements, the 'weird old Victorian ideas of "intellectual property"' are going to have to continue to be dealt with. Remember... you likely cannot reasonably afford an army of lawyers to ensure that pretty much noone uses your work without paying you, but big companies like Microsoft, RedHat, IBM, Oracle, etc, etc, and wealthy individuals can.
For as long as those wealthy entities can lock up and force you to pay for their work and ideas, but make it ruinously expensive for us little people to -individually- do the same to them, we'll need "weird old Victorian" things like licenses to help correct this imbalance of power.
