FOSS depends on copyright laws. Oldest versions of Linux and UNIX are more than 20 years old, so early versions of both would be hypothetically now in public domain in the absence of Disney-lobbied maximalist versions of copyright laws, or in the total absence of one.
And this would be a problem how? If copyright expired after 20 years and an evil commercial company privately forked the public domain Linux kernel 2.6.18, what would we lose?
loading story #50199444
No it doesn't. Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.
loading story #50198064
loading story #50198049
Aside what was already said: a lot of people do genuinely think GPL is a stupid idea that needs to go and Linux could have been licensed under MIT or even CC0; however, I think one should be cognizant of the fact that virtually no mass produced product other than Macs and PS4/PS5 use BSD and the rest uses Linux, often begrudgingly, but benefiting tremendously from both free-beer and forced-libre nature of it.
FOSS only "depends" on copyright laws in the sense that it is a hack to get around the existence of them (and now their children, anti-circumvention laws.)
loading story #50206240