Canadian software engineer living in Europe.
True, but the mere existence of an AGPL project that follows the MIT one might be enough to convince would-be contributors to choose our version instead.
It may also be more likely to be adopted by non-corporate Linux distros that favour the AGPL over MIT (Debian for example) which in turn could help make the AGPL version the dominant one.
The best example I could point to would be BSD. Unlike Linux, the BSD kernel was BSD (essentially MIT) -licensed. This allowed Apple to take their code and build OSX and a multi-billion dollar company on top of it, giving sweet fuck all back the community they stole from.
That’s the moral argument: it enables thievery.
The technical argument is one of practicality. MIT-licensed projects often lead to proprietary projects (see: Apple, Android, Chrome, etc) that use up all the oxygen in an ecosystem and allow one company to dominate where once we had the latitude to use better alternatives.
The GPL is the tool that got us here, and it makes these exploitative techbros furious that they can’t just steal our shit for their personal profit. We gain nothing by helping them, but stand to lose a great deal.
Here’s a fun idea, let’s fork these MIT-based projects and licence them under the AGPL :-)
Ubuntu is literally just Debian unstable with a bunch of patches. Literally every time I’ve been forced to use it, it’s been broken in at least a few obvious places.
I have zero interest in anything Microsoft has to say about Free software.
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I’m not sure I’d be happy in a fully remote role where you’ve got hundreds of employees voting on how you build stuff, but I know that there are lots of people who dig this pattern, and they’re clearly doing Good work.