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Open source licenses exist to try and prevent attack on open-source by groups privatizing otherwise freely distributed code. It's an arms race. In a world where copyright's expire on reasonable timeframes, the value of copyleft licenses is vastly reduced since useful code becomes freely available within a reasonable timeframe.


Why do you say the code would become freely available? With no copyleft, you could fork any project and keep the code closed forever.


but the copyright to that code would expire in another X number of years.

So it's equivalent to having GPL on that private fork, but on the timeframe of copyright expiry.


No. The GPL says you must provide the source when asked. In the new situation they would just never distribute it.




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