The unfortunate reality is that a significant proportion of software engineers (and other IT folks) are either laissez-faire "libertarians" who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL, or "apolitical" tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.

To these folks, the MIT/BSD licenses have fewer restrictions, and are therefore more free, and are therefore more better.

it's been a trend for a while unfortunately. getting rid of the gpl is the motivation behind e.g. companies sponsoring clang/llvm so hard right now. there are also the developers that think permissive licenses are "freer" bc freedom is doing whatever you want /s. they're ideologically motivated to ditch the gpl so they'll support the change even if there's no benefit for them, financial or otherwise.

Here's a fun idea, let's fork these MIT-based projects and licence them under the AGPL :-)

Its simple: its to exploit it in a corporate setting. I license under MIT because a lot of my things are of small convenience, but never without debating the ethics of why I am licensing it.

GNU is the enemy to capitalism and if you need more proof, look at what Apple has done with LLVM/Clang and CUPS. We need GNU more than ever.

fyi: GNU coreutils are licensed GPL, not AGPL.

there is so much other confusion in this thread, i can't even 🤦

here, take my stuff and don’t contribute anything back, that’s totally fine

I mean, yeah? They are probably fine with that and think that software should be distributed without restrictions. You may not agree with it, but it's their choice. Not really stealing if they give it away willingly.

I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore.

I mean, most of them that want to use a GPL-like license use the GPL or LGPL rather than the AGPL. :P

why are developers even agreeing to this?

Are they? Last I checked this wasn't as much of a plan as much of it was just a developer thinking out loud. And even if it was a real plan, developers should continue doing what they should be doing anyway: Write their scripts without any GNU/uutils/whatever-microsoft-calls-their-evil-uutils-fork extensions. Then their scripts could run across all platforms, including GNU, uutils, FreeBSD and BusyBox.

At any rate, if Microsoft really wanted to make their own coreutils fork (if they haven't already), they're not really that complicated tools. They could devote like maybe a year of engineering time and get it pretty much compatible.

If you're developing software for a platform that doesn't allow users to replace dynamic libraries (game consoles, iOS, many embedded/commercial systems), you won't be able to legally use any GPL or AGPL libraries.

While I strongly agree with the motives behind copyleft licenses, I personally never use them because I've had many occasions where I was unable to use any available library for a specific task because they all had incompatible licenses.

I release code for the sole purpose of allowing others to use it. I don't want to impose any restrictions on my fellow developers, because I understand the struggle it can bring.

Even for desktop programs, I prefer MIT or BSD because it allows others to take snippets of code without needing to re-license anything.

Yes I understand that means anyone can make a closed-source fork, but that doesn't bother me.
If I wanted to sell it I might care, but I would have used a different license for a commercial project anyway.

For me, my personal projects are generally MIT licensed. I generally don't like "restrictions" on licenses, even if those "restrictions" are requiring others to provide their source and I want as many people to use my projects as possible, I don't like to restrict who uses it, even if it's just small/home businesses who don't want to publish the updated source code. Although, I admit, I'm not a huge fan of large corporations potentially using my code to generate a profit and do evil things with it, but I also think that's not going to be very common versus the amount of use others could get from it by having it using MIT who might not be able to use it otherwise with AGPL.

With that said, though, I have been starting to come around more to AGPL these days.

Honestly it's probably just because so many devs are involved more in their code and don't want to worry about the nuances and headaches involved in licensing. MIT is still open source.

MIT/GPL is fine for smaller tools.

Bruh instead of all this speculation, you guys could have just looked it up.

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/discussions/4358#discussioncomment-8027681

I worked on an oss library with an MIT license and my colleagues told me they with that instead of GPL was with GPL it basically forces anyone who uses the library to make everything in their project available.