Ask Cisco how they feel about it. There is a precedence of companies using copy left licensed software and the community benefiting from it.

If companies are just going to be blatantly criminal and violate software licenses they were going to do that anyways. I’m not sure how much experience you have working in or with mega corps but the ones I have worked with in the past HATE the idea of opening themselves up to being so blatantly liable.

When I worked in big tech we had a license scanner that checked the libraries we were using. Anything strongly copyleft would be flagged and we would be contacted by legal.

You might have experienced working with companies that act otherwise. I encourage you to call them out, maybe work with the FSF to get another Cisco style ruling.

Funny you mention ZFS though. It’s not the GPL that was the issue. It is CDDL that’s incompatible. GPL is generally comparable with foss licenses. MIT, MPL, Apache, BSD all are comparable. It’s just CDDL that’s incompatible with copyleft in general.

If you think the community will benefit more from MIT licensed software than copyleft I think you need to look harder at the modern corporate world. Corporations are not altruistic.

This being said I’m not sure there is much more to be said here. You’ve gone to saying I believe in magic and that there are corporate GPL conspiracies. I just don’t see the proof and I think there is not much more to be gained by such talk.

If “theft” is your only concern yes. It’s a common misconception that copyleft licenses stops rich companies from stealing. It does not.

I am more concerned about societal enrichment vs corporate enrichment.

If you release some code under MIT that a company finds useful, they could take it, improve it a bit, and resell it back to the community. This enriches the company at the expense of the community. Without the original code the company could have never taken it as a basis to sell and the community that wrote the code gets nothing.

If you release that same code as AGPL the company can take it, improve it and sell it to the community. BUT the difference is that the community now benefits from those improvements too. Maybe more improvements happen. Maybe a second company takes those improvements and sells them too. The community would have all the improvements and would benefit from greater competition.

With copy left licenses. The community is enriched and companies are enriched.

With MIT style licenses. Companies are enriched at the expense of the community.

I mean you can’t steal open source code if you tried. The code is too respectful of your freedoms. I don’t think anyone is arguing against you here.

In terms of algorithms, nothing. But you were the one who mentioned algorithms. I am speaking of code in general. I do want for persons to contribute back to the community if they use community sourced code. I don’t think we can trust corporations to be altruistic.

This all being said in your earlier message you were implying it’s all about ego. I was just saying it is not about ego.

For me it’s all about community resources and societal enrichment.

CC0 vs CC-SA is actually a really good (rough) analogy.

I will say shortness is a major advantage of the MIT license. Easy to understand.

For the MPL 2.0 here is a good short reference.

https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/mozilla-public-license-2-0-mpl-2

Then why not LGPL or MPL 2.0? They could use your code as is too. I’ve worked in major tech companies and they are ok with these. They just don’t like GPL for obvious reasons.

Obviously too is that you have the right to choose how to license your code, but I don’t think it makes sense to use MIT when LGPL and MPL 2.0:

1. Exist
2. Are accepted by tech corps for internal use.

If you don’t believe me look at your corps license inclusion policy.

Sure. Very briefly. These are all open source licenses which (roughly) means the source is freely viewable and changeable. But the specific differences are:

• MIT/BSD - Anyone can take the code and do whatever they want, if they start with your code, improve it then make it proprietary there is nothing you can do.

• GPL - If someone makes changes to your code and improves it they have to make it available for use by the community too IF and only if they distribute the binary.

• AGPL - Like GPL except that even if they are running the code on their server and not sharing it they still have to give back improvements.

• MPL 2.0 - Like GPL but limited to specific files. This is useful for things like statically linked code. I don’t often recommend this but it can be needed for static only code bases like rust. Proprietary software can link with this and not be covered by the copyleft share alike stuff.

• LGPL - Like the GPL but for dynamically linked libraries. Proprietary software can link with this and not be covered by the copyleft share alike stuff.

• SSPL - Like AGPL but technically even more intense. If you use SSPL you must open source all the tooling you use to manage that hosted SSPL license. Any tools to make sure the SSPL software is running well or to set it up must also be open sourced.

The OSI technically does not say the SSPL is “open source” but given that they recently admitted that they regret defining the AGPL as open source I think the OSI might be showing a bit of corporate bias.

Pull requests have nothing to do with any of this. Also algorithms can’t be copyrighted nor patterned in the first place so it would not matter.

You could implant an algorithm in a proprietary code base and some gal could reverse engineer it and publish it as GPL or MIT or whatever and all would be a-ok.

Wait, so because a few execs violated the GPL and threw their employees under the bus, we should abandon copyleft entirely? That’s like ditching locks just because burglars exist. Companies that want to exploit software will do so, BSD or not. The GPL didn’t land those four guys in prison; their higher-ups did. Giving up and saying “ok big corp I’ll just do what you want“ just makes it even easier for corporations to profit at societies expense.

MIT and BSD software licenses might as well be renamed to “I love big daddy companies and trust them 100% uwu”

There is no reason not to choose GPL/AGPL/MPL 2.0/LGPL/SSPL if you are writing open source code.

MIT and BSD just let companies enrich themselves at societies expense.

+1 for Toki Pona!

It’s a very small language (< 200 words) that forces you to think about how you think. It’s not hard to learn and quite wholesome. The name means “The Language of Good”

Also there is an amazing art scene around the language. Being able to listen to the music keeps me going.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqCH2JzaHCjZ84qxUQXrwAjpKQEowGsn9