In my opinion, Stallman has been proven right many times over.
However, increasingly more and more services which could've been an on-premises deployment become SAAS. This includes games (live services they call it). It is _designed_ to end, and designed to not be able to run locally.
Tell me who's the greedy one.
2. Need revenue to pay for the Cloud services.
3, Charge mouse users for the Cloud services.
It's the (stupid) circle of life.
I can see it has some disadvantages for companies incorporating GPL software in their products, but none for companies merely using GPL 3 software.
If I had to guess - The patent rights clause weirds out a lot of lawyers. Obviously anyone who works with hardware doesn't like the anti-tivoization clause. Another possibility is the AGPL (which IS lethal for obvious reasons) is often conflated with GPLv3.
All I know is GPLv2 is fine, GPLv3 is usually not, and AGPL is never possible in corporations that I've worked for.
Richard Stallman himself doesn't seem to make money from any software he made directly, but from various grants and such, for example:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220123032418/http://tech.mit.e...
I thought he was on the payroll for FSF, but his reportable compensation has been zero from 2002 to 2022 according to:
As a developer, I don't want to rely on code from a project that "seems particularly profitable", because one day it's 100% certain they're going to start making their profit off me.
I'm _extremely_ wary of any "open source" projects that're VC funded, because the entire VC industry exists to make rich people richer at everybody else's expense, throwing a few bones at a few of the founders and a vanishingly small portion of the startup employees. As soon as they think that can get away with it because they have enough "free" open source users locked, they're gonna turn all the screws to chase the "100x or bust" exit strategy the VCs rely on. At the expense of everybody who foolishly built something on to of that project without an easy way to replace it.
As an alternative to working on a second job to fund their passion, we are seeing developers trying various things to make their one passion job pay, such as licensing tweaks or VC funding. These don't seem to work out very well, I think it's best explained here:
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211229
"So it is with free software. You literally cannot pay for it. If you do, it becomes something else."you're just seeing survivorship bias.
Plenty of them would've also disappeared, because their core contributor no longer wanted to give out free labour and moved on.
And is also subject to survivorship bias. For every OSS project that makes it, tens of thousands do not.
He resigned in 2019 following allegations of inappropriate behavior towards women (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20990583).
I highly doubt that the FSF, who developed the GPL licenses and values free software above anything else, would change the licensing of their projects like "these companies" do.
It will be even worse after the GPL developer generation is gone.