> Many homebrew projects don't want to be fully Open Source because they want to hold back some special sauce, either to slow down efforts by the console vendor to stop them, or to differentiate themselves from other homebrew projects for clout. So someone building a foundational library for homebrew on a platform might want to, legitimately or otherwise, avoid presenting themselves as GPLed.

For context, The Homebrew Channel itself was one of these projects. fail0verflow had put shittons of work into DRM for the Channel and its installer... purely so that you couldn't remove an anti-scam warning screen that they'd put in there to warn people about shady people trying to sell The Homebrew Channel.

Thing is, GPL requires you to explicitly allow that behavior[0], so HBC can't use GPL software.

[0] It is extraordinarily difficult to write a blanket copyright license that provides most of the terms we care for but prohibits this kind of behavior, without giving the authors the ability to veto anything they don't like. Standard operating procedure in the FOSS space has been to just allow all commercial activity.