Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft

Within If content is published with a If content is published with a In summary: I have been a fan of, and developer of, free open source software and
free content ever since I've been old enough to understand what these
things are and build things that I thought other people might find
useful. Historically, I was a fan of the permissive approach (eg. my
blog is under the First, I wanted to Second, I do appreciate the copyleft idea of "using copyright against
itself"However, while copyleft My switch from favoring permissive to favoring copyleft is motivated
by two world events and one philosophical shift.First, Second, One way to visualize how both pressures increase the relative value
of copyleft is a graph like this:Third, Fundamentally, if you assume economies of scale, then by simple
mathematical reasoning, nonzero openness is the only way that the world
does not eventually converge to one actor controlling everything.
Economies of scale means that if I have 2x the resources that you do, I
will be able to make more than 2x the progress. Hence, next year, I will
have eg. 2.02x the resources that you do. Hence...A key pressure that has prevented this dynamic from getting
out of hand historically is the fact that we are not able to opt out of
diffusion of progressMore recently, however, several trends threaten this balance, and at
the same time threaten other factors that have kept unbalanced growth in
check:Rapid technological progressGreater political instabilityThe modern ability to make proprietary software and hardware
products that distribute ability to use without diffusing ability to
modify and control.Limits
to economies of scaleThis all increases the possibility of persistent, and even
self-reinforcing and growing, power imbalances between companies and
between countries.For this reason, I am increasingly okay with stronger efforts to make
diffusion of progress something that is more actively incentivized or
mandatory.Some recent policies made by governments can be interpreted as being
about attempting to actively mandate higher levels of diffusion:EU standardization mandates (eg. Forced
technology transfer rulesUSA In my view, the downsides of policies like these tend to come from
their nature of being coercive policies of a government, which leads to
them preferentially incentivizing types of diffusion that are heavily
tilted toward local political and business interests. But the upside of
policies like this is that they, well, incentivize higher levels of
diffusion.Copyleft creates a large pool of code (or other creative products)
that you can only legally use if you are willing to share the source
code of anything you build on it. Hence, These arguments are not absolute; in some cases, maximizing the
chance that something gets adopted by truly everyone is worth licensing
it permissively. However, on the whole, the benefits of copyleft are
much greater today than they were 15 years ago, and projects that would
have gone permissive 15 years ago should at least think about adopting
copyleft today.