I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don’t see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It’s like they’re painting their faces with “here, take my stuff and don’t contribute anything back, that’s totally fine”
The unfortunate reality is that a significant proportion of software engineers (and other IT folks) are either laissez-faire “libertarians” who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL, or “apolitical” tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.
To these folks, the MIT/BSD licenses have fewer restrictions, and are therefore more free, and are therefore more better.
“apolitical” tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.
This, I understand.
laissez-faire “libertarians” who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL
This, I do not. Apologies for my tone in the next paragraph but I’m really pissed off (not directed at you):
WHAT RESTRICTIONS??? IF YOU LOT HAD EVEN A SHRED OF SYMPATHY FOR THE COMMUNITY YOU WOULD HAVE BOYCOTTED THE MIT AND APACHE LICENSE BY NOW. THIS IS EQUIVALENT TO HANDING CORPORATIONS YOUR WORK AND BEGGING THEM TO SCREW OVER YOUR WORK AND THE FOSS COMMUNITY.
I feel a bit better but not by much. This makes me vomit.
I write code for a living. I cannot, by any means, utilize a GPL library to support the needs of our customers and will either have to write my own replacement or dig to find something with less restrictions like MIT.
On many occasions, we will find bugs or usage gaps or slowdowns that can get pushed back to the MIT licensed open source cause we were able to use it in the first place. If your goal is to make sure your library gets used and gets external contributors, I don’t see how GPL helps the situation as it limits what developers can even choose your library in the first place. If your goal is spreading the ideology that all software should be free, go keep banging your drum for GPL.
I work in a company that deals with both commercial and government (military) software. The government is becoming more and more fixated on the software supply chain, or sw dependencies so to speak.
Existing dependencies are largely getting a pass for now, but with each new one I need to give a justification for. This includes the license of that software. I can’t use GPL at work.
