alt Hacker NewsThe MIT and BSD licenses predated the GPL. People have a choice as to which ethic to follow ... it's not the result of a corporate conspiracy. (And I'm a social democrat, not a corporate simp.)
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pferde • yesterday at 6:58 PM
The creation of those licenses, maybe. Their mass popularization, and the pooh-poohing of GPL licenses that often goes with it in related discussions, is much more recent.
I'm not so clear the choice was made consciously. There's a big swing away from the GPL and towards MIT/BSD around the time that Apple starts adopting a bunch of open-source projects for inclusion in MacOS X, and it accelerates when various big companies announced that they would be forbidding GPLv3 adoption. Fast forward to the cloud provider era, and basically no new software is being placed under the GPL (at least in part because Amazon/Google/Facebook/etc are predicating contributions on being GPL-free)