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Open source licenses literally are meme
Open source licenses are terrible at actually keeping your software safeguard against the usage of it on proprietary softwares, which is the whole point of its existence.
## The concept
Open source licenses are licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition — in brief, they allow software to be freely used, modified, and shared. These licenses have set of "rules" that ranges from being truly free to use (aka permissive licenses) like MIT license or having copyleft ideologies, i.e., having safeguards to avoid the software being used in a proprietary fashion like GPL, the two most common types of open source licenses.
## The issue
An open source license may be an actual license through the (F)OSS respecting developer's eyes, however other see it as a paperweight instead. Hence, there would be a regular case of [the open source projects on proprietary softwares being sold commercially by tech corpos](https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/16/vizio_gpl_contract/), while the developers of those projects are getting barely any benefit to no benifit from it at all.
## Permissive licenses are the absolute worst
Permissive licenses may sound nice as a concept, (as these licenses give absolute freedom in its usage) in practise this would mean that your project would immediately get copied by the others while giving you very little to no credit at all, as there are 0 safeguards being promised against so. Hence, you can't even give a lawsuit to someone even if you wanted as they still didn't violate the license of your software.
The meme below perfectly explains the state of these licenses:
## Copyleft licenses are barely any better
At least copyleft licenses do have safeguards written on it which in theory, protects you against your software being used without your credit or even being used on a proprietary software. Going to the court for resolving the license violations however, is a different story. Though there *are* examples of [copyleft licenses being successfully enforced](https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/fortinet-settles-gpl-violation-suit/), these law cases aren't easy to win as majority of countries don't really take these licenses seriously and combining the fact that usually it is some giant tech corporation who violates these licenses, creates a very steep uphill battle to fight, due to the cost, effort and time required for these law cases, especially for a small (F)OSS community.
There are still cases of companies [regularly violating the licenses](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/xiaomi-is-dragging-its-feet-on-the-gpl-again-this-time-with-the-mi-a1/) for a very long time even after a lot of complaints.
## There is not a real soultion to this
Looking through idealistic manner, one way to fix the copyleft licenses would be to simply make politicians to take these licenses more seriously. However since we are talking about politicians, that's very unlikely.
So what's my solutions to this? Well, I would recommend to at least stick to copyleft licenses and avoiding permissive licenses all together, if you don't want to get screwed over by the tech corporations, or release your [software as a freeware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware/) instead.
;tags:software open-source rant
;description:FOSS License: The God That Failed.
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