alt Hacker News> The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals
As a counterpoint, when I make something open source, I really mean "freedom", which includes the freedom to build a commercial service using the software. I use the MIT license not because of "corporate interests to undermine free software ideals", but because I really want the software to be free as in freedom.
GPL, GPLv3, AGPL and similar license actually restrict the freedom to do anything you want with the software. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with it, just that "free software ideals" could mean different things to different people, and there might not be any "corporate interests".
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But the point others make is, this type of libertarian free is wide open to the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy. A very successful, repeatable business strategy to own supposedly "open" domains. There's a reason people have debated freedom to and freedom from for centuries. This is the core conundrum/challenge of freedom.
GPL style licenses provide some guarantee you're investing in an ecosystem that is resistant to EEE. Freedom from takeover in exchange for freedom to make any arbitrary business venture. It's a choice, but to conflate libertarian freedom as the only form of freedom is narrow and ignores this centuries old unsettled debate.
Corporate interests != GPL is not on the cards
The GPL is meant to be viral... it infects other projects so as to open up software ecosystems. The open source movement came out of a time when nearly everything was proprietary and locked up.
Tivo-ization really woke up a lot of people to the dangers of proprietary lock in and abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization