> You are quite welcome to disagree with that stance, but please cut out the inflammatory language. It's not charitable towards others and it isn't healthy for good discussion.
It is no more inflammatory than the coordinated war that was waged against copyleft licenses on tech fora and social media for more than a decade before hackers started to realize en masse that it was all a ploy to extract free labor from them. There are legitimate uses for permissive licenses and I still use them for those. But the big players certainly pushed them well beyond those cases where they made any sense. More than enough evidence has since emerged that prove this to be the case.
It does no one any favors to deny the presence of bad actors and their malintent behind the utter mess we find ourselves in right now. I find it disturbing that whenever people express their frustration regarding this, there are attempts to shoot them down with accusations of inflammatory language, political correctness, etc. But the truth is that the big players have caused far far more damage than any inflammatory citicism they face for it now. What's actually unhealthy for good discussion is the dystopian censorship of criticisms because the truth make some people uncomfortable. Every bit of harsh criticism they receive here is something they willfully and rightfully earned.
> hackers started to realize en masse that it was all a ploy to extract free labor from them.
There are at least three different groups of people here:
1. Those paid to write permissively licensed software - not free labour.
2. Those who are happy to be free labour. I read a comment by a BSD developer about being very proud and happy to be able to buy a games console that ran on a BSD derived OS.
3. Naive people who are are shocked when someone creates a proprietary fork of their code. It is something that they explicitly gave everyone permission to do, and it is something that has been happening for decades - I can think of Windows using BSD network code in the early 90s, but there are probably much earlier examples. Apple's OSes are very high profile examples since 2001, and Nextstep before that.
The last group have themselves to blame. Did they not take the trouble to understand a legal document? Do they know nothing about the history of their industry? Do they takes steps to stop it - for example by doing releasing updates under a copyleft license?
I agree with you that big players do push licenses that suite themselves, but it relies on either deliberate choice or foolishness by contributors for it to work. I also think copyleft is usually of greater benefit to society.
People being naive doesn't give the bad actors the right to exploit them. That's victim blaming. The responsibility falls squarely on the actors who actively made the unethical/immoral choice.
> What's actually unhealthy for good discussion is the dystopian censorship of criticisms because the truth make some people uncomfortable
I think you're missing the point.
There are developers who prefer MIT not because they're a "big player" or "because truth make people uncomfortable", people simply have different preference for what the ideal license is for their project.
If you cannot deal with that, that sounds like a you problem, but judging by your comments, you're not exactly gonna re-evaluate with a different perspective, since you seem unable to understand others have different ideas and opinions than you.
Others having different ideas and opinions doesn't mean that those ideas and opinions are correct, or that they are beneficial. They might be detrimental to the FOSS movement or to society in general.
So "to each their own" only goes so far.
One can very well accept that other devs/teams have different ideas and opinions && that they can (by law) have such ideas and opinions, but also think that they have them for the wrong reasons, and that they shouldn't have them, and that we'd all be better off if they didn't.
> There are legitimate uses for permissive licenses and I still use them for those.
The parent didn't talk about forcing developers to choose copyleft.
And you ignored the stated legitimate reasons for choosing copyleft in most cases if you care about the society.
> There are developers who prefer MIT not because they're a "big player" or "because truth make people uncomfortable", people simply have different preference for what the ideal license is for their project.
Did you miss this part in my comment?:
> There are legitimate uses for permissive licenses and I still use them for those.
Or this part from GP's comment?:
> being able to do this is the reason why companies have brainwashed the Internet into ...
Or this part?:
> ... choosing the MIT license for everything
(emphasis mine) All of these imply that the companies did a mass campaign and not individual brainwashing. They also imply that the MIT license is not suitable for everything and by corollary that there are instances where they do apply. All of it are aimed at the companies that resorted to these underhanded tactics. Where does any of these imply that every single use of the MIT license is due to brainwashing? I can't understand how anyone concludes instead that it's all a personal attack on MIT license users (that includes me too).
> If you cannot deal with that, that sounds like a you problem, but judging by your comments, you're not exactly gonna re-evaluate with a different perspective, since you seem unable to understand others have different ideas and opinions than you.
Not only does one have to deal with people reinterpreting others' comments according to their convenience, they also have to withstand guilt tripping based on it. And the irony is that you cite my complaint about the same issue for it!
It is no more inflammatory than the coordinated war that was waged against copyleft licenses on tech fora and social media for more than a decade before hackers started to realize en masse that it was all a ploy to extract free labor from them. There are legitimate uses for permissive licenses and I still use them for those. But the big players certainly pushed them well beyond those cases where they made any sense. More than enough evidence has since emerged that prove this to be the case.
It does no one any favors to deny the presence of bad actors and their malintent behind the utter mess we find ourselves in right now. I find it disturbing that whenever people express their frustration regarding this, there are attempts to shoot them down with accusations of inflammatory language, political correctness, etc. But the truth is that the big players have caused far far more damage than any inflammatory citicism they face for it now. What's actually unhealthy for good discussion is the dystopian censorship of criticisms because the truth make some people uncomfortable. Every bit of harsh criticism they receive here is something they willfully and rightfully earned.