What other alternatives are there?Several months ago I've started ranting about a "
Software Freedom Scale" that ranks different software licenses according to the amount of government force they are based on, public domain being the ideal. It is important to note, however, that aggression-free software isn't always 100% guaranteed to be zero-cost and open source - a programmer has no more obligation to release his source code than a book writer his research notes, or a sculptor a video of every stroke of his chisel. Having the software you use be open sourced is a very important benefit, but that benefit must come from qualitative competition between various alternatives, not from mandatory transparency through government force!
There is hardly any good software out there that exists in the public domain, but the next best thing seems to be permissively-licensed software whose licenses were actually intended to prevent someone else from suing the authors in case that software does something naughty (though such disclaimers would not be necessary in a society with rational jurisprudence). Some of those licenses also forcefully require proper attribution, which shouldn't be necessary in a free society because there are many other ways to prove who did what first, but I don't think there's any history or potential for that clause to be used as a trigger for substantial legal aggression.
It is also important to note that this "Freedom Scale" was simplified to ignore things like whether that software originated through government aggression (as is the case for much of it), and the ideology of the programmers involved (I was particularly upset by
a recent example of a programmer I idolize being a total commie). History is filled with evil things, and we are all standing on the shoulders of slave-traders, warmongers, and other savages - what matters is that we do the right thing going forward. (I have briefly considered the possibility of a license that specifically denies all rights to any government employees and other
NAP violators, but that would obviously be unenforceable and comically hypocritical.)
So this leaves us with permissively-licensed open source software, which isn't as popular as copyleft or proprietary software, but still gives us a solid foundation to leverage. The so-called "Anarcho-Capitalist software stack" begins with any of multiple competing BSD-licensed UNIX operating systems:
FreeBSD (and its derivatives like
PC-BSD, which are great for new users),
OpenBSD,
NetBSD,
DragonFly BSD (my emerging favorite), and someday maybe even a derivative of
MINIX 3. Although the BSD family of operating systems use competing implementation ideas, they voluntarily adhere to a
common UNIX philosophy and industry standards (much more so than Linux), and it can be as easy to switch between different BSD's as it is between Linux distributions, especially when you're using a common package management system like
pkgsrc. I must admit that Linux has just recently surpassed all BSD's in performance and portability, but that only happened due to a massive inflow of funds from companies like IBM, and the BSD projects could easily catch up and surpass Linux if more people started contributing, which is fairly likely to happen as more people come to see the down-side of copyleft aggression.
A lot of people use BSD and similarly licensed code, but they're more likely to release their own open source work as GPL for reasons stated above. It even could be argued that BSD-licensed operating systems have a 100% market share, because I can think of no noteworthy operating system that didn't borrow some code from them - most famously Mac OS X, but Windows and Linux as well!

The
X server (the core GUI foundations that most UNIX-based operating systems use) is permissively licensed, but most noob-friendly desktop environments (ex. KDE, Gnome, Xfce, ROX, etc) are not. There are a few less popular window managers that are permissively licensed (ex.
Enlightenment,
Fluxbox,
JWM, and the
Compiz 3D effects engine), but that is becoming ever less relevant as more and more software is starting to function though the Web browser. This is good news, because there's finally a real possibility of a permissively-licensed open sourced Web browser coming about some time in the future, all thanks to Google's
Chromium! The current version of that browser still isn't entirely stable, still married to Google's motives, and still uses some GPL code, but its BSD components will inevitably be used to create a new browser some time in the future, which I see becoming a backbone of a complete permissively licensed desktop environment with AJAX-powered widgets.
Fortunately my favorite database tools (
PostgreSQL and
SQLite) are already permissively licensed, as are many other great server-side components (ex.
apache,
ssh,
pureftpd,
bind,
cyrus,
qmail, etc), and a sufficient selection of shell tools and scripting languages. I never found any serious need for a complete
IDE, so I've always used free non-copyleft editors like vi and
SciTE. The biggest GPL'ed villain in an average developer's software stack is the
GCC compiler and the rest of the
GNU toolchain, but it may soon be possible to replace it with
Clang, and perhaps even new programming languages like
Google's Go, or
Apache Foundation's noble efforts to rebuild
all Java components (and
a complete application server) under their permissive business-friendly license.
Unfortunately there are still some gaps in the permissive software stack that current software just cannot fill. For example, we have a great BSD-licensed
BitTorrent library, but all of the GUI clients that use it are GPL'ed. We also have a similar situation with BSD-licensed multimedia codecs from
Xiph.org (ex. ogg, vorbis / theora), but there doesn't seem to be any permissive media player program out there (except playing them in Chromium via
HTML5 audio / video tags), and since most video you come across online is in other formats non-permissive software like FFmpeg or GStreamer is most often needed for conversion. Of course I have no moral qualms about just using a Windows box in addition to my primary BSD boxes, with the Windows box doing all my shady P2P and codec crunching for me and spitting out a nice standards-compliant HTML5 interface for playing any multimedia files that I need.

Does anyone else here share my philosophical preference for permissively-licensed free software, and a growing disdain for the self-righteous hypocrisy of the "copyleft" movement? I would most appreciate learning what everyone here (and any fellow software developers in particular) thinks on this subject.