Hi Will!
Yes. Please more detail on the licensing.
For the tl;dr I am going to quote Antonio Diaz:
I think "open source" organizations (specially BSD) are wilfully destroying the long-term benefits for society of the GPL, and they are doing it for short-term benefits like popularity and greed
https://mikegerwitz.com/2014/03/Re-FreeBSD-Clang-and-GCC-Copyleft-vs.-Commun...
At 28c3 in 2011 Cory Doctorow spoke about a "coming war on general computation": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
From my point of view, this scenario is being played out as Doctorow
has described it would. There is a large industry working on replacing personal computers with user-hostile, locked-down mobile phones, tablets, "Chromebooks," and home automation (now called IoT) appliances, that subject people to constant surveillance and intrusive advertising and behavioral modification regimes.
All of this is built using, and enabled by, permissively licensed software, and the deficiencies of version 2 of the GPL. Bradley Kuhn gave a good talk about some of these issues at LinuxConf Australia in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mnHebVSUb0
A decade ago, the hoped-for hypothetical reason for permissively licensing Common Lisp packages, to encourage use and adoption of Common Lisp, seemed like a plausible idea.
This has not happened. I don't see any point in continuing to compete in the permissive license race-to-the-bottom anymore. The people who whine about Common Lisp libraries are good at one thing: whining about not getting everything handed to them for free. They are not going to contribute, and there is no point in trying to please these people.
All this is related to web development, JavaScript, and Parenscript in a very direct and practical way:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
What I see is that many things that were accessible as regular web sites are now being rewritten as proprietary single-page HTML5 web applications (some of them gated to only run on Google Chrome!), or as proprietary applications available exclusively through Apple iTunes or Google Play on iOS or Android (three layers of proprietary lock-in…).
This is bad enough for me as an able-bodied and technically competent person. A couple of months ago I attended a talk by Chime Hart on his experiences as a blind computer user. This move to proprietary JavaScript web applications has been a huge, unmitigated, ongoing regression in Web accessibility over the past five years.
Everyone was happy with the demise of Flash on the web, but now we have ended up in an even worse place. Flash use was limited to certain bad actors. These bad actors just went on to co-opt web standards (to the point that DRM is now a web standard), and spread their user-hostile ideology and techniques into an "industry best practice."
To quote Anastasia Fedorova, "after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we all ended up in the East."
Vladimir