This is a fairly serious issue in some free software places (eg. Slashdot). It seems that copyright when used by big corporations is evil and restrictions are good, but when the GPL gets weakened by them it's suddenly a bad thing. Unfortunately, you can't have it both ways, sometimes in life you need to take the bad with the good.
It seems that copyright when used by big corporations is evil and restrictions are good, but when the GPL gets weakened by them it's suddenly a bad thing.
Keep in mind that the GPL is not an end in and of itself; it's a cute little legal hack to create a self-contained domain that simulates a world without copyright, with a one-way boundary to ensure that things stay inside that domain (there's a fairly straightforward game theory analysis of why this gives GPL-style licenses a competitive advantage over BSD-style licenses, but that's getting off topic).
So, in that context, it actually makes sense to simultaneously support strict enforcement of the GPL and oppose copyright.
Of course, most people don't think copyright is intrinsically immoral and thus won't find the above perspective persuasive, but I'm pretty sure that's roughly where people like RMS are coming from.
> it's a cute little legal hack to create a self-contained domain that simulates a world without copyright
I think even that isn't the end in and of itself. The ultimate goal of GPL is freedom. In a totally copyright-free world one could make GPL code derivatives restricted by hardware that only runs signed binaries (tivoization).
That would be true if it weren't for the fact that the GPL requires distributors to publish source code as well as license their derivatives under the GPL. So it's not just a copyright-free zone, like Creative Commons Share Alike is.
Requiring GPL on derivative works is the one-way boundary I mentioned; the simulated "copyright-free zone" in question is comprised of all GPL-licensed software, so anything existing wholly within that realm isn't impacted. The purpose of the derivative license requirement is to discourage external dependencies creating copyright-by-proxy inside the GPL zone.
I don't actually think the source code publishing requirement is necessary; something like CC BY-SA would probably suffice.
Sure. And to quote a line from "Wicked" (Awesome musical), "There are seldom few at ease with moral ambiguities, so we act as though they don't exist".
Classing things as strictly "bad" and "good" is too simplistic for most situations. Most things have elements of good and bad.
