What I know is if projects use permissive licenses, the software end users getting is usually proprietary.
Copyleft is designed to prevent that from happening.
My gripe with copyleft was that it used copyright, which I wanted to avoid participating in. Unfortunately, this means that you're making it very easy for others to take your work, obfuscate it, and receive copyright protection for their "derivative".
My goal was to remove copyright from my work, but using permissive licenses seemed to instead mean "I'll give up my copyright protection, but you can take my work and receive copyright protection and sue others".
The way I think of it is that with permissive licences the freedoms can be removed from the code, but with copyleft the freedoms can't be removed from the code. By freedoms I mean the freedom to study the source code, to run it for whatever purpose you want, to make modifications and to share the code with other people.
As soon as someone else contributes, copyleft licenses also prevent you from using your own work in anything proprietary. So if you have side project that may potentially grow into a business if it takes off then permissive makes sense.
That would be non-free / non-open to be clear. A copyleft license is non-permissive but is still free/open. Just want to be clear, since some people mistakenly think things like that commercial use requires permissive licensing.
And just the same, copyleft licenses (which are not "non-permissive" in my book) such as GPL don't "mean that you cannot without consent", they just want you to share the result back under the same license (which is often an issue for some corporate projects).
BTW, it's not only copyleft code that is a problem. "Permissive" licenses also have compliance requirements, such as attribution or preserving the original license text. Only code under Public Domain/CC0-like licenses can be reused without care.
> Copyleft is a string. The default would be complete permissiveness.
I have answered a similar line of questioning before.
Arguing strongly for permissive licenses is arguing for a kind of passive freedom which presents as freedom from obligations. Copyleft is the sort of active freedom which presents as a guarantee of rights.
Copyleft is the requirement that derivative works carry the same license ("share-alike"). There's a lot of Free Software that doesn't have that requirement.
They use an MIT license, which is equally viral. And is copyleft really more ideological than permissive licenses? Copyleft still leverages copyright to its advantage, which can be seen as validating the usefulness of copyright
This can't be emphasized enough, after an entire generation of users and developers has been raised listening to "fake license news" from the likes of Stallman.
Permissive licenses simply do not help achieve this goal as effectively as copyleft licenses do.
I use to share that view, but I'm no longer sure if this is true. Do you have evidence you could point to, or is this a instinctual opinion? I don't have evidence going the other way, but I don't think it's a clear cut truth.
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