Ever heard of Android, cloud or SaaS? For example our phones and the cloud services they use are choke-full of FOSS, but we plenty of surveillance and very little freedom. Same for modern cars, TVs and many other things.
There are plenty of user-hostile services that use FOSS internally. Weak licenses are huge enablers for this behavior.
None of that software would have happened if it weren't for big corporations putting their resources behind those things AND pooling their resources by sharing code under an OSI approved license with each other. This is open source working as intended. Millions of developers are creating value and are relying on each other. And yes, some money gets made in the process. That's the whole point of committing that much resources. Most software development simply is not charity. And the willingness of companies to spend resources on software is typically motivated by their ability to use the resulting software.
And people can and of course do fork Android. E.g. Amazon and Huawei, etc. have nice products based on Android that don't include any Google proprietary bits. And there are many other android based and derived things out there. Likewise the various cloud providers have a lot of shared components that they depend on and they also are contributing a lot of code. Many of the smaller ones pretty much just use things like openstack. And they all rely on the same big open source things: Linux, Mysql, Redis, Docker, etc.
This would simply not happen with licenses such as AGPL. Easy to say, because it hasn't happened and shows zero signs of actually starting to happen.
Good!
So the argument "use a copyleft license or get your work stolen like android" doesn't really work. You'd need to argue that you need a strong copyleft license. Which is a tougher argument to make, because people dislike those more.
And that's why its extremely imaginary in this context, these are "core utilities", not a distributed database. Their value is in being the same everywhere and installed on every system, not in a SaaS interface. The very basis of uutils itself is that it is the same as the GNU equivalents.
One irony is -- look at the linked article's comments -- I have to imagine some of the people saying "Rust is not ready for X because it doesn't have multiple implementations" are the same people saying "Don't create an alternatively licensed implementation of coreutils". Just completely unprincipled, untethered reasoning.
And don't forget the king of ironies -- GNU coreutils themselves are a reimplementation of proprietary code.
> There are plenty of user-hostile services that use FOSS internally. Weak licenses are huge enablers for this behavior.
This is obviously a red herring. Any bad behavior would be the same re: the GPL and the MIT license in this particular instance.
The answer is always -- do better than your competitor. If the GPL is better, fork the MIT code, and build a better alternative. The problem is -- the people actually contributing chose the MIT license. And that should be the end of the matter. You don't get to have an opinion on someone else's choice of license if you contribute nothing.
This combination of bullying and whining by GNU/FSF advocates is extremely off-putting. I'm a contributor to uutils (but I don't speak for it!) and watching the apoplectic whinging by Redditors and HN commenters just re: this project has completely turned me off the GPL for my other projects. When will people realize that being a completely insane socialist/MAGA/atheist/Christian/FOSS advocate at a dinner party is a turn off?
Interesting to hear given how much whining I heard in your and other replies...
> completely insane socialist/MAGA/atheist/Christian/FOSS advocate at a dinner party is a turn off?
Plus you are resorting to insults and yet you claim I'm the unreasonable one.
> Plus you are resorting to insults and yet you claim I'm the unreasonable one.
I don't think I characterized anyone as unreasonable. Your examples are not analogous to the present situation, but I think your real problem is you're telling other people, very well aware of the Good News of GNU/FSF, something they already know.
I, and others, have taken a very clear eyed looked at the GPL/FSF and said "No, not for me," and I wish you'd understand one of the reasons why is yours and others rampant religiosity. I don't comment under GPL licensed project, "Hey I wish you'd change your license to MIT because [red herring, and bad faith argument...]" because I know it's in incredibly poor taste as a non-contributor. MIT/GPL/AGPL/etc isn't always my cup of tea either but its simply not my choice.
That said -- sure, if you/anyone has a merits based case to make as to why something makes more sense as GPL licensed, I'm all ears. But, as it stands, your arguments are in poor taste.
To copyleft people that's a bug, for most Linux users, that's a key feature of the license. Without that, we'd all be using BSD (like most mac users are) or something else.