The GNU Public License is popular with many developers, but it’s lost a lot of its momentum over the years. Commercial developers hate it, because it imposes complexity into license management. The…
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This piece was more interesting than I went in expecting it to be. But it hinges I think on a disputable claim, that the GPL's value is based on a network effect, so that the GPL gets dramatically less useful (and thus attractive to newer projects) as the base of mainstream GPL software shrinks. I'm not sure I understand why that would be the case.
The AI rewrite of the Linux kernel also seems farfetched. I don't think it really belongs in the title of this post.
That's funny, because the "network effect" of the GPL was always extremely obvious to me as part of the point. The idea being that the more that GPL software forms a cohesive ecosystem, the less financially viable it becomes to operate outside of that ecosystem. It's viral, right? And software builds on software, we're about 15 layers deep at this point. The hope is that eventually, so much software is GPL that you effectively have two choices when writing something new: 1) join the GPL borg, or 2) boil the ocean reimplementing the entire stack from scratch.
Unfortunately, free software was successful enough that the latest generation takes it for granted, and has forgotten why radical software politics is necessary. They do not understand, if they even think to ask, why so many nerds ran GNU/Linux even when it was objectively kind of terrible - why so many people were motivated to pour time into a half-broken thing. I hope by the time they do understand, it will not be too late.
My controversial opinion: the problem with the GPL is that it isn't viral enough. It was written by nerds with a good understanding of computers, and poor understanding of people. As such, it focuses too much on technicalities like what it means "link" programs together, in an attempt to rigorously specify definitions that permit running proprietary programs on free operating systems, and vice versa.
But it doesn't work. Every time your Android phone downloads a firmware update, by rights that should be a GPL violation, as it's a single giant executable that mixes together GPL and proprietary code, deliberately made in such a way that separating them out after the fact is impossible - in fact, the program is explicitly designed to fail to run if you so much as tamper with a single bit (signed images). It is hard to imagine something further from Stallman's vision - hard to imagine something less respectful of user freedom. And yet this is permitted on technicalities, because this functionally unmodifiable binary blob happens to be structured in a particular way that computer nerds recognize as a type of database called a "filesystem", and the GPL parts are neatly organized into database entries called "files". And they all agree that that's okay, whereas if you mix the code in a different type of database called a "link table", well that's bad and wrong.
> The hope is that eventually, so much software is GPL that you effectively have two choices when writing something
I’m really glad then that it didn’t work out this way, because I wasn’t really keen on all the individual freedom of joining the borg.
Which "individual freedom" do you feel the GPL denies you? As far as I can tell, it only prevents you from piggybacking on other people's work, and adding unfair stipulations to the resulting product. It is a very symmetrical, "do-unto-others" type license.
In the scenario you’re describing, when I write my own code, I am limited in what license I can pick for that code because of licensing choices other people made.
But you're not actually restricted from doing anything, are you? What is it exactly you want to do that other people's choice of GPL prevents? Steal their work and sell it? Oh how unfair!
My pleasure!
We are talking about a hypothetical universe in which nearly all software is GPL, such that it is almost impossible to write useful software without building upon other GPL code. In such a universe, licensing "your" code as MIT would indeed be unfair, because you would be taking the work of others, illegally stripping the label, and making it available to profitable interests to use without compensation to the original developers against their express wishes - said compensation merely being the extremely reasonable request to share back, as you were shared to.
You still haven't really explained why you're so keen on doing that sort of thing.
By akerl_ 2026-03-0823:53 > licensing "your" code as MIT would indeed be unfair, because you would be taking the work of others, illegally stripping the label, and making it available to profitable interests to use without compensation to the original developers against their express wishes
I'm not sure why there are quotes around "your".
If I write code and license it MIT, but it includes code that has a different non-GPL license (lets say Apache), my code is MIT-licensed, and the included code is still Apache-licensed.
I haven't illegally (or legally) stripped any licenses, or changed how it's available to others. I've picked a license for code I wrote, and the developers of code I took a dependency on picked a license for their code. People who want to use my code have to consider the license of my code and also the dependencies I used.
The GPL is largely unique in its desire to control what license I can pick for my own code.
I'm keen on picking my own license for my own code because I personally don't want to block my code from being used by anybody, commercially or otherwise. I've got no issue with developers who do want to prevent closed-source, commercial, or any other kind of downstream usage. And I'm happy to comply with the licenses of code that I leverage as part of my code. I do take issue with developers who want to impose their licensing preferences on my code.
Why does the GPL network effect mean that I, as a library developer, am incentivized to choose GPL over MIT?
By dTal 2026-03-0822:19 Libraries or executables, it makes no difference. You are incentivized to use GPL because you wish to build on top of work that is GPL.
Obviously in large part that didn't happen, because of a cultural tendency to use more permissive licence variants (such as AGPL) for libraries, in the pragmatic hope that this would encourage their use even in proprietary programs, and therefore incentivize back-contributions from a wider audience. But this indeed halts the "virality" of the GPL, and so one is once again forced to conclude - incredibly - that Stallman was not radical enough...
By ignoramous 2026-03-0819:101 reply
May be LLMs learning from all of the FOSS code out there, and out-performing a team of domain experts, is helping us realise the promise of free as in beer.chardet is a Python module ... with 170 million downloads ... licensed under the GPL. A different developer ... to include it in the Python standard distribution ... [reimplemented] it. With [Claude] ... in 5 days ... the reimplementation ... [has] better performance.I guess the question is: was Claude trained on chardet? Is that really clean room?
By spwa4 2026-03-0820:07 What do you mean? It's pretty damn clear how copyright and courts work, but let's review:
1) when a large copyright conglomerate sues a teenager: 30.000 USD per violation + enforcement of the license by an armed police officer coming to their house.
2) when a teenager has copyright violated by a large copyright conglomerate, or any large company: change the rules and force a compromise, resulting in $0 in damages.
In fact it has just been made clear that copyright DOES NOT protect against AI training. That's "fair use".
But let's pretend the courts are fair. Let's say I take all disney movies and tell AI to make a new one. Will courts suddenly decide Disney owns the copyright on both the model AND the movie? 100%.
By ignoramous 2026-03-0820:15 > was Claude trained on chardet? Is that really clean room?
Not a true clean room; the TFA notes:
... Every file is different. Automated plagiarism checks report only 1.3% in common code ... the reimplementation looks very clean. Different code, different algorithms, and better performance.
By bloppe 2026-03-093:45 This article ignores the other side of the coin. You can argue that AI makes "clean room" re-implementation so cheap that copyleft is doomed. But then it follows that re-implementing proprietary software as free software would also become "free". So mb AI will kill copyleft, but then it would also kill the need for copyleft in the first place.
By 7e 2026-03-091:30 GPL licenses are already only a small minority of the total OSS world. But the GPL will die because AI can write equivalent software easily, and it’s more customized to boot. And for that reason OSS will also wither away; there’s little reason to upstream AI changes. Code is cheap and the FSF is a dinosaur.
