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”
Speaking for myself, it’s because future monetization can be easier under mit when using a foss utility and private code.
My project would not exist at all unless there were ways to make money off it.
True, others can also use that same code too, in the exact same way, but that requires quite the investment, and those of us that are doing this are banking on not getting the interest of a monopoly in that way. We are competing against other small businesses who have limited resources.
At the same time the free part can get a boost by the community.
I comment a lot in politics here, and am sometimes an ass, so cannot name this project
not sure how it would be more difficult to make money using gpl tools
For our use case, this makes the most sense.
I’m not at all sure about the larger trend you noticed, but I know a non trivial number are doing it for the same reasons
Could you elaborate on those reasons, please? I’m not sure what you mean.
The mit license allows a mix of public and commercial code run by the same company, with minimal legal issues. One can use other tactics I am sure, but this one seems good when the commercial code absolutely needs the public code .
I think some confusion here can be resolved by stating this is anti foss, taking advantage of foss, it is capitalism taking advantage of having a good code base while making sure any contribution from outside the company is minimized. At the same time it gives my company absolute control over the private part.
Usually get into arguments here! I’m not defending it, but am saying open source would be less without.
I understand this may not be exactly how you meant your comment, but I think it’s important to clarify that free/libre software can also be commercial software, and in fact must allow commercial use in order to fit the Free Software Definition. It is probably easier to make lots of money with non-freely licensed software but I think contrasting “public” code with “commercial” code muddies the terminological waters a bit.