this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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[–] Occhioverde@feddit.it 21 points 1 year ago

This argument reminds me of the Tolerance Paradox described by Karl Popper, who stated that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.

In the licensing context, yes, the Apache and Expat licenses may grant your users the freedom to create proprietary software out of your works, but at the cost of sacrificing all the basic freedoms of all the users that will use the derived non-free product.

So, like Popper said that you should prefer removing the "smaller" freedom for a society of being intolerant in order to guarantee the "greater" one of remaining tolerant in the future, since you still have to choose which freedoms you are going to negate, it's preferable to use copyleft and impede the "smaller" freedom of creating proprietary software than not using it and allowing the crushing of future users' fundamental rights.