I used to agree until I saw corporations starting to fork open source projects to run them internally like the “I made this” meme.
If I spend months or years of my life toiling over a project and license it permissively with MIT or such, they can just swoop in one day and take it for free and be like “thanks, we’re super rich and we’re going to make mega bucks off your code and give you nothing” (and yes this does happen https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws).
No, screw that! I’m gonna make my stuff AGPL and those guys can damn well pay me for my time of they want to use my stuff (or more cynically, do it anyway or go and reimplement it themselves in-house knowing damn well I can’t afford an army of lawyers to actually do anything about it).
I used to agree until I saw corporations starting to fork open source projects to run them internally like the “I made this” meme.
If I spend months or years of my life toiling over a project and license it permissively with MIT or such, they can just swoop in one day and take it for free and be like “thanks, we’re super rich and we’re going to make mega bucks off your code and give you nothing” (and yes this does happen https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws).
No, screw that! I’m gonna make my stuff AGPL and those guys can damn well pay me for my time of they want to use my stuff (or more cynically, do it anyway or go and reimplement it themselves in-house knowing damn well I can’t afford an army of lawyers to actually do anything about it).