Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Would the Founding Fathers support open source

16 Apr 2025

Watch on YouTube

This is a YouTube video titled "Would the Founding Fathers support open source" containing a dialogue between two speakers discussing the freedoms provided by the GPL open source license and the philosophical importance of software freedom. The conversation explores how foundational freedoms relate to software usage and distribution.

If the founding fathers were around today, I think they would be.
Open source advocates. If you think about it, as more and more of our lives are influenced.
And actually controlled.
By the software we use, if we don't have fundamental freedoms attached to that software.
We'Re not truly free.
WordPress is under a license called the GPL, which has four freedoms. The freedom to.
Use the software for.
Any purpose, so you can use it for anything, whether I.
Agree with you or not. The freedom to.
See how the software.
Works, you know, open up the hood.
See how it works, see every line of code.
The freedom to.
Change it is the third freedom.
And then finally.
The freedom to.
Redistribute.
Those changes so you can share them.
And the GPL.
Is a fun little hack where if you share them, you have to provide those same freedoms to who you share it with. So it's called a viral open source license, as.
Opposed to.
MIT license or some of the others.
That aren't.
So, yeah, I.
Just kind of decided that this was what I was going to devote my life to.