Guardianship of the Licence is Not Enough (the Case of Systemd and Microsoft)
Published 4 days ago: (lots more in there of interest)
THE Linux Foundation almost never chooses the GPL (it didn't choose it for Linux or Git) and it's hardly surprising given the true controllers of this so-called 'charitable' (not!) foundation. Bruce Perens said that “Linux Foundation is an infringer's club.” They dislike the GPL, but sometimes they merely inherit it.
Abundant focus on licensing, moreover, created somewhat of a 'blind spot'. If a piece of software uses some licence, will people follow it? If it's vast and is released every month/week, can people fork it? If it does something harmful, can the licence alone curtail that?
We've long discussed how the licence of Systemd proves this point. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its founder refused to say anything against it when it was controlled by IBM (also no comment on RHEL going proprietary despite being built on the GPL) and now that it is increasingly controlled by Microsoft there's still not a word of criticism, let alone condemnation.
Whether the GPL gets enforced or not, if people adopt lousy software, that will have negative consequences and if it becomes difficult to not use that software (due to a creeping web of dependencies), lousiness can become a universal standard. Oh, but don't worry, there will be a "Blue Screen of Death" when things go wrong or your /home
directory goes missing due to a lack of modularity and mediocre programming (thanks, Microsoft staff). █