Everyone thinks they're cool and everything for not using the GPL and related licenses, until Amazon (or another big player) comes and eats their lunch by offering a cloud-based version of your software (like elastic/elasticsearch)
Any hobbiest who writes free software for the community’s benefit is doing the same community a disservice when they allow private corporations to profit from the community’s work without recompense or sharing their work back to the community. The corporations also get to use the community’s work to redirect effort away from the community to their own product and platform.
I'm not sure why this is frequently brought up in the context of the GPL. The GPL says nothing about that and has never held that as a concern at all. Communities who were using GPL with that intent have seemingly always been mistaken. From the text of the GPL: "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program." It doesn't say anything about disallowing private corporations from profiting without recompense. If you want to force companies to pay you, you're better off with a closed source license.
Edit: The lack of enforcement of GPL is a different story, but you can trace that directly back to the very same community, including the FSF, who seem to have decided years ago that enforcing the GPL is not worth it anymore for some reason.
From Wikipedia’s summary of the essays:
The author proposes Free software licenses (mostly GPL) as a solution to social issues created by proprietary software and described in essays.
Edit: Since the license itself is vague on what those "social issues" actually are aside from sharing and changing the program, in my experience projects will tend to use it for whatever they feel like. Sometimes this is aimed towards community building but often isn't. To me the community building aspect mostly happens outside of these legal decisions, for example: closed source programs can have a community too, sometimes that community might even be hosted in the same places such as github.
you know that in case of actual litigation, judges will not only look at the actual text, but also at the intent surrounding it, right ?
It's absurd to expect the word "community" to appear in the text of the GPL: it's a legal document, non a manifesto.
I'm not sure why you're saying this? I don't expect that word to appear in the text.
It also seems mostly not possible to prove or disprove that "almost every person involved knew." Did you mean this as a personal anecdote with the people that you knew? If so, that's probably great for you and your community, but apparently those who were writing the legal document that governs said community didn't agree. Sadly it is possible for there to be oversights from day one.
(Also your point is a bit flawed, only AGPL really saves you from the Amazon situation.)
I wouldn't be so sure, for this kind of tooling it's not like the software is exposed behind some API of some sort. When Amazon is renting you a virtual machine with those installed on top, are they distributing the software? It's not clear cut at all.