I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don’t see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It’s like they’re painting their faces with “here, take my stuff and don’t contribute anything back, that’s totally fine”
My rule-of-thumb is: is the licence going to make things better for users? In other words, I try to predict whether a company would just not use my AGPL-licensed code, or would potentially contribute back. If they wouldn’t, I don’t really care and rather my code at least gets used to build something presumably useful.
The point is that even if companies have the personnel to contribute back, most of them don’t. It simply isn’t in their interest. If a project is good enough, AGPL will mean that no monopoly will form around that project and open standards will be maintained. AGPL is simply a bastion against closed-source software working against the best interests of consumers
Yeah I get that point, and so my point is that if the use case is important enough that they’d be able to justify allocating that personnel, I use the AGPL to give them that nudge. When it’s just some non-critical component, then I’ll just slap an MIT on it and be done with it.
The only problem is companies will always try to use MIT and using it for small projects will set a precedent. And we don’t have a governing body strong enough to enforce the GPL (nobody listens to the FSF)
Ha, well, if my single-digit-downloads (all by me) NPM module is influential enough to set precedent, then I’d consider that a success.