To give you an example, if git was under the MIT license instead of GPL , then Microsoft can silently add incompatible features to GitHub without anyone knowing. The regular git client appears to work for a while. Then they start advertising msgit with some extra GitHub features and shortcuts. Once they get to 50% adoption they simply kill the open source version off.

If GitHub required a special client to be installed tomorrow… I would have to concede and use it. It’s GPL that stops that because everyone has to get every new feature.

When Slack was first rolling out the dev team in my office of 50 people we all hated it. Thankfully it had an IRC bridge so we could use Slack through IRC. It was seemingly the same experience as before except more business users were in the chat rooms. Once the Corp side of the business were onboard, they dropped IRC support, forcing us to use their clients.

Now it doesn’t matter that rules or laws or privacy invasion they do. They have captured the companies communications and can hold it hostage.

I’ve seen it again and again. When is the last time you downloaded an MP3 file?