> All this Free Software movement started by something really similar to "right to repair", a firmware bug in a printer that was proprietary software. Free Software is about being in control of software you use. The spirit was never "contribute back to GNU", the spirit was always "if you take GNU software, you can't make it non-free". Those GNU devs at the time just wanted a good and actually free/libre OS, that would remain free no matter who distributed it.
Distinction without a difference. The end result is the same.
GPL software is a box that must be kept open, so that everybody would be able to take from it.
If you pick the box and build an altered version of it, you must keep it open, you are legally prohibited from attaching a lid to it.
There's nothing about any expectations, let alone obligations, to put anything back into the original box. Usually it's not very easy (you must follow strict standards) or even impossible (see e.g. SQLite).
It is a pretty big distinction with different end results in practice. Look at Android, you can use the source in a "right to repair" manner but Google doesn't take patches so you can't give back even if you wanted to.
The same goes for Apple and Google's OSS browser. The source is there, but there is more or less no way to give back, and they certainly don't.
> Look at Android, you can use the source in a "right to repair" manner but Google doesn't take patches so you can't give back even if you wanted to.
Well, license obliging the original author to take patches back would be weird one.
But Google could suck in any change to their own and make it better.
> The same goes for Apple and Google's OSS browser. The source is there, but there is more or less no way to give back, and they certainly don't.
That's a different problem that's a bit orthogonal to licensing and has more to do with project leadership. Like, you don't even need to have OSS license to allow users to contribute to project.
Distinction without a difference. The end result is the same.