Thinking more about it I am not sure that there is a conflict there.

If I use Apache to run my web site I am still within the ideals GPL.
My PHP application does not need to be GPL and if I write a special module for Apache that does not need to be GPL.
If I try to make money off selling Apache with my module or PHP then I run afoul of the intent of the GPL.

Your comparison of Office/OOffice/Gdocs is interesting but you could just as easily substitute Gdocs for www.theweathernetwork.com or Linkedin.

The question should be: Are you locked into a proprietary data format?

The real issue is; can I take my data with some application and can I move it to some other application?
And that has little to do with any of the copyleft schemes.

Copyleft does not solve all problems but it has solved enough so that the industry is dramatically different than it was 30 years ago and it appears that there will be no going back soon.

Once upon a time I developed a bunch of IBCS software for a project I was working on but the project was going nowhere so I released it to some Linux kernel folks with the request that I get "some credit".
If I had released it under some form of copyleft I would have likely gotten the attribution that I wanted but all I got was a lesson in trusting people.


I am also not sure that this is a religious fight.
Religious fights usually involve people killing each other.
I often say there are only 2 true evils in the world: Politics and Religion.
Its the reason we kill each other en-mass.


On 07/13/2017 11:56 AM, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:


On 13 July 2017 at 11:27, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
​> ​
Can developers
> incorporate GPL software while wholly circumventing the FSF's social goals?
> This paradigm needs to be addressed but IMO has been largely ignored for an
> assortment of reasons.

I believe the answer is that yes they can.  This appears to be why the
AGPL license exists as per this:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html


​It exists, but barely, to the point of irrelevance. And even the description of the license admits that it doesn't really solve the open/closed issues inherent in SaaS.
So my point stands that this is an important facet of software freedom that has been lost amidst the dogmatism of "free software" versus "open source".

- Evan


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