People should be able to do whatever they want with the fruit of their labour, even publish software as public domain and not care if corporations want to make money off it.
Who are you to tell them they are acting like a scab? Live and let live.
You argued for your rights, and I reminded you others have rights as well (because it seemed you had forgotten).
You're a scab if you work for free, replacing a worker that would have been paid otherwise. If you get paid for your MIT licensed code, you're not a scab :)
Because copyleft code benefits society as a whole, and the benefits remain around. Non-copyleft mostly benefits companies that are free to use instead of hiring someone to do it, or pay the authors of the GPL code for a proprietary license.
If we are going to throw words at each other, I could equally throw zealot at you. That sort of attitude tars the rest of us, so you are damaging the reports of the things you seek to protect.
I'm a fan of AGPLv3, for the reasons you state, but throwing insults at others for having a different preference just makes you look dickish and by the indirect inference of outsiders makes other AGPL proponents look dickish.
Please stop posting flamewar comments, especially of the ideological sort. You've done it repeatedly in this thread, and in other places recently. We have to ban such accounts, regardless of which ideology they favor. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Yeah, most companies won't touch copyleft licenses at all due to the impact it has on their own licensing, regardless of the issue of contributing back. I guess LGPL is an exception, but most legal teams I've seen ban that too.
In practice, I'm not sure it has much effect on how many developers are hired though. If they could have used it, they would just use their existing developers to build something else. If they can't, they will use them to build that functionality, sure, but I don't think headcount would increase. They would just build slightly less capable products. Their competitors are in the same position after all.
> I'm not sure it has much effect on how many developers are hired though. If they could have used it, they would just use their existing developers to build something else.
Yes. But while the developer build the something else, they can't build the original thing. So the company either hires more people or keeps the current people on the payroll for longer.
It's a simplification, but I guess we can agree that if a person is reimplementing GPL licensed code, they won't be implementing something else in that same time?
> They would just build slightly less capable products. Their competitors are in the same position after all.
Unless the competition starts to say that they will release their products under GPL license. Then they have a gigantic upper hand, and society gets that free software as well.
So in the end releasing MIT licensed software as an individual has only downsides for the person doing it (unless they have the fetish of the download counter spinning faster).
It's certainly one perspective. For some types of software it may make sense.
I generally release software under the BSD license. My goal is to allow the widest possible use with as few legal restrictions as possible. I have no moral objection to companies using my code, building on it and not contributing back, if that is what they want to do. I like seeing my stuff used and benefiting the maximum number of people.
So far, everyone who had used my code has contributed back. Most people don't want to maintain forks and their own patches.
My stuff isn't that strategic I guess. Just useful.
