I'm not sure I agree with this as a general point of view.
Speaking generally, I'm not sure that one can claim
>> The original authors tend to be the users
There are endless forks of say emacs,and I expect RMS is not s user of any of them.
Of course RMS is free to inspect the code for all of them, separate out bug fixes from features, and retro apply it to his build. But I'm not seeing anything in any license that requires a fork to "push" bug fixes to him.
>> This aligns with the reason why some people publish their work under copyleft licenses: You get my work, for free, and the deal is that if you find and fix bugs then I get to benefit from those fixes by them flowing back to me.
I think you are reading terms into the license that simply don't exist. I agree a lot of programmers -believe- this is how Free Software works, and many do push bug fixes upstream, but that's orthogonal to Free Software principles, and outside the terms of the license.
>> That's the spirit here and trying to argue around that with technicalities is disingenuous.
Licenses are matters of law, not spirit. The original post is about this "spirit". My thesis is that he, and you, are inferring responsibilities that are simply not in the license. This isn't a technicality,it goes to the very heart of Free Software.
But also, i think even the spirit of the original copyleft movement is being misunderstood. As a GP said, the spirit was about centering users, requiring developers to be responsible to _users_, in order to create the kind of society where our _use_ of technology would be unconstrained in certain ways.
It was not about anything owed to the "original" developers, it was not about developers responsibility to other developers. In original spirit, even. It was definitely not about creating a system where people could make adequate income from writing software. That was not even the spirit in which the licenses were devised.
(To be fair, it also imagined/hoped that a large portion of (but not all) users could also be "developers" in the sense they could tweak software to meet their needs -- for their own and others use, though, not for money. Even if users would be coding, the "spirit" still centered them as users, and centered the conditions of use, their needs and desires for how that software would work, not conditions of profit or income from charging people for software use).
Most people don't actually want to maintain a fork. They would prefer that their patches are mainlined.
Consider Linux. It's huge and most vendors really don't want to maintain a fully independent fork. One reason they might do it anyway, is if they could keep their patches private. But the GPL means they can't, so most just choose to upstream patches.
> Most people don't actually want to maintain a fork. They would prefer that their patches are mainlined.
But that's a downstream decision regarding efficiency in their developing process.
That's not what free software is about, there is nothing about that in its principles nor licences.
That's just Development Process and maintenance decision, offloading patch integration to upstream, which they might or not accept depending on your changes. None of that is about Free Software. You can see similar decisions/trade-offs taking place in any org with multiple software dev teams with ownership over libs etc, regardless if it is free software or not.
It's like everyone here is a lawyer nitpicking the license as it exists today. But absolutely before the licenses existed Open Source was about those principles, to share code, to share bug fixes, to publish any improvements. So everyone would get better. To say the 'license' doesn't make this explicit it really missing the point.
Speaking generally, I'm not sure that one can claim
>> The original authors tend to be the users
There are endless forks of say emacs,and I expect RMS is not s user of any of them.
Of course RMS is free to inspect the code for all of them, separate out bug fixes from features, and retro apply it to his build. But I'm not seeing anything in any license that requires a fork to "push" bug fixes to him.
>> This aligns with the reason why some people publish their work under copyleft licenses: You get my work, for free, and the deal is that if you find and fix bugs then I get to benefit from those fixes by them flowing back to me.
I think you are reading terms into the license that simply don't exist. I agree a lot of programmers -believe- this is how Free Software works, and many do push bug fixes upstream, but that's orthogonal to Free Software principles, and outside the terms of the license.
>> That's the spirit here and trying to argue around that with technicalities is disingenuous.
Licenses are matters of law, not spirit. The original post is about this "spirit". My thesis is that he, and you, are inferring responsibilities that are simply not in the license. This isn't a technicality,it goes to the very heart of Free Software.