this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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Iirc GPL is how we have OpenWRT. Because a company used Linux in their routers, but forgot to release the code initially until sued by FSF or whomever.
Imagine, for example, that your phone has forks of Linux utilities with mysterious closed-source functionality added here and there. And you'd need to reverse-engineer that functionality to have LineageOS and such, instead of just taking the source-code.
Proprietary apps are prone to enshittification, and permissive licenses allow vendors to build their proprietary software on open-source software without giving anything in return.