I have to strongly disagree with you that GPL is a religion. While there Are certainly people who sound religious in nature when they talk about the GPL, The real reason it is important is because of what it forces developers to do on behalf of the users. It balances somewhat the power between the developer and the user.
Under other licensing, developers wield an extraordinary amount of power over the users. Yes, The user could opt not to run that code, but realistically that isn't an option in the modern day. Developers can and will abuse their access to your machine to serve their ends regardless of whether it adds value to you or not. For example, how much data collection is in nearly all modern software?
Perhaps you would argue that what I've said above only applies to a very tiny minority of users who have the technical skills to actually utilize the code, and everyone else It's just a religious argument. I don't fully disagree with that. There is another clear benefit That even those untechnical users received from the GPL, and that is the essentially forced contribution back from companies who want to build on top of it. I don't think there's any better example than the Linux kernel, which has gotten lots of contributions from companies that are otherwise very proprietary in nature and would never have open sourced things. This has benefited everyone and has acted as a rising tide lifting All boats. Without the requirements in the GPL, this most certainly would not happen.
My response to it however, is that those users still get a good amount of protection because The code is out there
Oops that last sentence (which is a sentence fragment) was supposed to be deleted, but slipped in some how and it's too late to edit. The point I was going to make was just that with the code being out there, the odds that some offensive thing the devs might do can be discovered by someone and have the issue raised. It also provides a powerful incentive to not stick something gross in there for risk of it being discovered and getting called out for it :-)
Under other licensing, developers wield an extraordinary amount of power over the users. Yes, The user could opt not to run that code, but realistically that isn't an option in the modern day. Developers can and will abuse their access to your machine to serve their ends regardless of whether it adds value to you or not. For example, how much data collection is in nearly all modern software?
Perhaps you would argue that what I've said above only applies to a very tiny minority of users who have the technical skills to actually utilize the code, and everyone else It's just a religious argument. I don't fully disagree with that. There is another clear benefit That even those untechnical users received from the GPL, and that is the essentially forced contribution back from companies who want to build on top of it. I don't think there's any better example than the Linux kernel, which has gotten lots of contributions from companies that are otherwise very proprietary in nature and would never have open sourced things. This has benefited everyone and has acted as a rising tide lifting All boats. Without the requirements in the GPL, this most certainly would not happen.
My response to it however, is that those users still get a good amount of protection because The code is out there