Why it's time to stop using open source licences - The H Open: News and Features

Free software is built on a paradox. In order to give freedom to users, free software licences use something that takes away freedom – copyright, which is an intellectual monopoly based on limiting people's freedom to share, not enlarging it. That was a brilliant hack when Richard Stallman first came up with it in 1985, with the GNU Emacs General Public Licence, but maybe now it's time to move on. There are signs of that happening already. Eighteen months ago, people started noting the decline of copyleft licences in favour of more 'permissive' ones like Apache and BSD. More recently, the rise of GitHub has attracted attention, and the fact that increasingly people have stopped specifying licences there (which is somewhat problematic). I don't think this declining use of copyleft licences is a sign of failure – on the contrary. As I wrote in my previous column, free software has essentially won, taking over most key computing sectors. Similarly, the move to 'permissive' licences has only been possible because of the success of copyleft: the ideas behind collaborative creation and contributing back to a project are now so pervasive that we don't require 'strong' copyleft licences to enforce them – it's part of coders' mental DNA... That's also why we don't need to worry about cloud computing – sometimes presented as a deadly threat to traditional copyleft licences – since there is no distribution that triggers compulsory contribution of code changes. But once more, we don't need that compulsion: if a cloud computing company wants to get the full benefit of free software, it will contribute back anyway. If it doesn't, it's missing the point.  So what licence should we adopt if not one using copyleft? Apache? BSD? How aboutno licence at all – that is, putting software into the public domain? After all, that's the logical conclusion of the move to more 'permissive' licences – one that permits everything... A fascinating paper by Clark Asay, Assistant Professor at Penn State University Dickinson School of Law (and also the brother of the well-known open source figureMatt Asay) explores this idea in depth, and offers some convincing arguments why putting free software into the public domain would work, and offers benefits..."