alt Hacker News>The original stance of the open source crowd.....
>The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses...
Interesting how the world have changed. The so called GPL preference, or GPL > GPLv3 > AGPL among Open source crowd is a recent thing. Arguably in the last 15 to 20 years. Both BSD and MIT dates back before GPL. And you will see far more people prefer BSD and MIT in the 90s and 00s.
I have also long argued that the license preference among generation has somewhat a linkage to political shift in spectrum. Likely to do with Tech, now known as Big tech taking advantage. And it used to be very cool if your OSS project get used by a big company, until it is not.
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> Interesting how the world have changed. The so called GPL preference, or GPL > GPLv3 > AGPL among Open source crowd is a recent thing. Arguably in the last 15 to 20 years. Both BSD and MIT dates back before GPL. And you will see far more people prefer BSD and MIT in the 90s and 00s.
Back when I was getting started in the mid-90s, GPL and LGPL were kind of the default. BSD and MIT were used for certain projects, like the BSDs and X11 of course, but the goal back then was to build up a large library of open source (then, "free software") as viable alternatives to proprietary software, and the GPL was the easiest way to do that and ensure it remained free.
It was the rise of Rails, and the attracting of commercial programmers and startup bros to open source in the '00s, that motivated the historical preference for BSD and MIT licenses.
> And it used to be very cool if your OSS project get used by a big company, until it is not.
Yup. Open source advocates would brag about adoption in enterprise. They would incessantly argue about how safe open source is compared to close source and would constantly complain about stupid managers not allowing open source.
Not all of them, but that stance was predominant when I was younger.
> And it used to be very cool if your OSS project get used by a big company, until it is not.
Working for big companies used to cool, but now they are just all EvilCorps.