Copyleft, the "joke" of programmers

 The term copyleft was beyond my knowledge before reading the article. But, as I understood, it is a very convenient method to share your code. The principle is that: if your original code is free to use, the copies or upgrade of this code should as well be free to use. It has been made so, to contribute to the development, for example, Linus Torvalds and his Linux. Even if we look at the word “copyleft”, we can see the difference between the latter and the word “copyright” which is restricting the usage of some software or other kind of thing.



As for copyleft types, there are only a couple of them. The first is strong copyleft which is a license that applies to all derived works and software components in the package. [1] The most well-known free-software license using strong copyleft is the GNU General Public License. A stronger copyleft license is the AGPL, which requires the publishing of the source code for software as a service use case e.g. when software is deployed on servers. [2]

As regarding "weak copyleft" licenses are often used to create software libraries. This allows other software to link to the library and is redistributed without the requirement for the linking software to also be copyleft-licensed. Only changes to the weak-copyleft-licensed software itself become subject to copyleft provisions of such a license. This allows programs of any license to be compiled and linked against copylefted libraries such as glibc and then redistributed without any re-licensing required. [2]

However, there is one more case and it is called the full absence of copyleft. At the first glance, it may seem like chaos but I think it is freedom. One man told us: “order is for idiots, genius can handle chaos” and I consider this quote as the best description of no copyleft. Here we can see total freedom for developers, but I’m not sure it is better than having even weak copyleft.

To conclude, I think any kind of copyleft is a pretty good practice for the programming world. It would be not fair if you can copy the whole code from someone’s repository and use it for private commercial purposes. It has made us look from a different angle to the development of some projects to benefit for all which is a good practice.

 

[1] - https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/copyleft

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

 

 

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