Related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/806/
Related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/806/
This argument reminds me of the Tolerance Paradox described by Karl Popper, who stated that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
In the licensing context, yes, the Apache and Expat licenses may grant your users the freedom to create proprietary software out of your works, but at the cost of sacrificing all the basic freedoms of all the users that will use the derived non-free product.
So, like Popper said that you should prefer removing the “smaller” freedom for a society of being intolerant in order to guarantee the “greater” one of remaining tolerant in the future, since you still have to choose which freedoms you are going to negate, it’s preferable to use copyleft and impede the “smaller” freedom of creating proprietary software than not using it and allowing the crushing of future users’ fundamental rights.
Wasn’t the Affero GPL (AGPL) created exactely to enforce copyleft in a SaaS environment?
Quoting from the GNU website:
[The AGPL] has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there.
Yeah, it’s easies and will make your life simpler as long as you want to do something the producer contemplated. As soon as you need a feature that is a little bit more peculiar, good luck with that.
And with this i don’t mean that Android is perfect, just that an even more closed ecosystem isn’t exactely the best choice.