My personal journey from MIT to GPL (2019)

I share the same point of view now. Especially after now 4 years in the software industry. The quantity of ope source software used is huge. But none of the money goes back to the authors.

Companies have two choices : avoid GPL like pest or embrace it.

We (I, mostly) contribute back to open source at work. The only problem that is not solved yet is should we use GPL-3 code, because we sign software and there is the Tivoïzation clause.

I still continue to release my (Rust) libraries with Apache-2.0/MIT. Because of static linking almost imposed by the current Rust development workflow. LGPL would contaminate the whole software if statically linked. Or make people link to it dynamically. Maybe this is not my problem but the companies'. Should we push for GPL libraries?

I consider both licenses to be about freedom however they differ in the freedom involved.

MIT style licenses are about freedom for the programmer to do as they want, not code freedom. GPL is all about the freedom of the code, at the cost of freedom for the programmer to do as they want.

I've gone the same route myself, from BSD style on earlier things to GPL on most things I do now. I'm still looking for a good license to apply to hardware projects though.

The purpose of a permissive license is to encourage proprietary derivatives that come with intellectual property restrictions, EULAs, SaaS with vendor lock-in, etc. The purpose of a copyleft license is to encourage derivatives that don't come with such restrictions. Copyleft therefore helps reach a local maximum of freedom for everyone as a function of restrictions on redistribution.

This is the fundamental idea behind copyleft that so many people seem to misunderstand whenever they say that MIT/ISC licenses are "more free" because they come with fewer obligations: copyleft licenses like the AGPL force a vendor to give up some power to improve freedoms for the wider community. Compliance is only hard if you want to control others' computing; the whole point of copyleft licenses is to oppose that.

(missing "(2019)" at the end of the submission title)