alt Hacker News> 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.
As a BSD developer from the 90s, that does not reflect my experience.
We wanted our code to be as widely used as possible. It’s really not any more complicated than that.
There was always tension between the folks that shipped GPL software and folks that shipped BSD/MIT software, but the dividing line was not whether or not we were “commercial programmers and startup bros”.
It has always come down to questions of what we believe freedom to mean, how we wanted to contribute utility to the world, and whether we saw the use of our software in commercial projects as a loss to ourselves in a zero sum game.
The rise of “software as a service” has changed that calculus for some, and disadvantaged those that sought to build commercial service entities around their open source software. In the areas that I work, it’s made no material difference.
As for Ruby on Rails, I think it’s outsized presence on hacker news might have given you an inaccurate picture of its influence on the broader open source ecosystem.