alt Hacker News> We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.
As a long-time developer and consumer of OSS I have to disagree. Open-source software has had an enormous effect on the world, and that... was kind of the point? When we licensed things as MIT we knew that corporations would use it. We wanted them to use them, adopt them and bring new users into the community. You take some, you give back. There was no expectation of turning your late-afternoons JS framework into a business. And not having access to it would absolutely not have stopped corporate behemoths from getting where they are, but would have killed many small businesses and startups.
That said, I've started licensing some of my code with the BUSL license [1] - unrestricted use, unless you are a large company. The code becomes MIT-licensed automatically after a set window to remove maintainability concerns.
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But why should I work for free so that companies can fire my fellow human beings?
The complaint here is, that those business are not necessarily "bringing people into the community", unless you are talking about passive users, who do not contribute. The businesses simply use the stuff built at no cost to rake in big money, while the person, who did the actual work does not see a cent. This is different with copyleft licenses like AGPL. Only that many businesses are so afraid of contributing anything at all, that they often don't want to use AGPL or even GPL licensed software.