Free Software Is a Failure

ipaddr

"GPL has become so complicated that only a programmer with relatively advanced legal knowledge and ability to read and properly understand “legalese” will be able to decipher it to know what they are able and unable to do with it" Have you ever seen legal terms in easy to understand form in any software, service or agreements?

7e

It's a failure because AI beat the FSF to the punch: it made software effectively free, as in freedom. You can have whatever software you like, now. The FSF never came close to that.

paulryanrogers

It is a contradiction that FOSS relies so much on heavy handed copyright. I'd be open to shorter copyrights and letting the chips fall where they may.

fsforever

You can still create free software, and use free software, and even charge money for support for free software. The relative success of commercial software and the rise of AI- assisted software doesn't affect the idea and practice of free software. If you don't like that AI companies train on the code, well, the whole point was that you can't really control what people do with the code you send them other than directly copying it without the same license, because that makes it nonfree. If your problem is that someone you don't like can benefit from your work, well, that was always the case. How many Russian drones run Linux?

uhhhd

There’s something familiar about promising to get rid of ownership and ending up with a bunch of people deciding what everyone else is allowed to do.

petcat

I think the failure came with the erosion of copyleft like GPL in favor of BSD, MIT, and other "free for all" licenses that companies exploited to the detriment of the community instead of being forced to participate as equals.

LanceH

This rant seems to be all over the place. It mostly seems to be the usual BSD is more free than GPL, but then he comes back that Redhat source is only available to people who paid for the binary (the only way to get the binary). You wouldn't even be entitle to the source under the BSD license. Maybe I read some of it wrong, but it was painful to get through with the constant telling me how bad things are before telling me what those things are. I truly despise this writing style. Set things up first, then discuss them, please. Then come to the conclusion of how bad it is with the reader.

bemtevi

Seems like this is more a bash against the GPL. > As soon as you leave this club and want to pull code from a GPL-licensed project into your MIT-licensed project, well, sorry, too bad for you. So what? The GPL seems like a decently fair way of saying that "I'll make a contribution, as long as everyone else using it keeps making that same open contribution". Personally, if I wanted to release open source code, I wouldn't want it to fall under an MIT license, because then some corp could simply take it and not make the same contribution back. The author claims this "harms developers of non-GPL-licensed FOSS software" - give me a break. Does it break their legs? Give them the flu? It doesn't harm anyone. Maybe just inconveniences them. Cry me a river.

collinfunk

> rewrites of coreutils to be faster and cleaner (e.g. Busybox or various Rust projects) Note that busybox is under the GPL. As someone involved with coreutils, I can’t say anything specific without examples, but speaking generally I would caution against putting too much weight into benchmarks.

smitty1e

Needs a (2021) in the title.

ChicagoDave

As much as I love open source software, I always thought it was naive to believe our capitalist overlords would ever allow it to succeed as intended.

rvz

"Free Software" is objectively a failure in practice and is economically unsustainable for small projects in 2026 for three simple reasons: 1) The GPL (and many other permissible software licenses) are not enforceable unless the injured party has a lot of money (in the millions). 2) To 90% of people, it meant "It's free as in $0, I don't need to pay". With free loaders and increased AI slop. 3) The aforementioned licenses have been completely been trampled all over in the AI era. The FSF has no economic solution to the "maintenance and support" for human developers. Now AI is involved and is mass discovering vulnerabilities in free and open source software. It and has left (unpaid) volunteers to clean up the mess. There is a legal grey-area and a risk of introducing GPL code in non-GPL codebases with LLMs and you cannot tell either way. Since LLMs can discovers even more security issues quicker than humans, you have no choice but to use AI agents to secure your code quicker than the attackers; and the question of licenses becomes less important over security. Stallman doesn't care and doesn't need to either. (Makes money via speaking fees instead of building free software) and it has created a culture of entitlement where new projects now have to compete against hundreds of forks assisted with AI and has made it worse for everyone else who is not hired to maintain a large open source project that is heavily funded such as Linux. The license issue failed from the start, and AI models were the final nail in the coffin for "Free Software".

seba_dos1

> In this post, I use the term "Free Software" to mean software licensed with Copyleft licenses, and to explicitly differentiate it from permissively-licensed "Open Source" software (which is what the Free Software Foundation and Co. also do). That's not what "FSF and Co." do at all. I'd expect someone writing an article about whether Free Software failed or not to understand that if they want to be considered seriously.