> the ASF, being non-copyleft, is much less ideological than you're thinking

Do you somehow consider copyleft style licenses "more ideological" than those which are not? That is probably more telling about your own views on licensing than it is on ideologies.

FreeBSD is not copyleft, and they work actively on eliminating GPL from their base. Debian mostly under the free software umbrella, but welcomes BSD code in their base.

Stallman is about as idelogical as you can get but has been known to argue for the MIT license in some cases. Just to mention a few examples.

Sure there are counterexamples, but I certainly don't hesitate to say copyleft does tend to be more ideological. In every instance I can think of, every serious discussion I've had with a company about project licensing that ended with anything other than the GPL, the concerns are virality, even when they like open-source (which is a practical concern overriding an ideological one), and a lack of any real interest in how it's licensed, just wanting it put out there with very few strings attached.

There is a very practical reason for choosing a copyleft license as an author. If you choose a non-copyleft free software license, then downstream users actually have more options than you do. They can take your code, add small modifications and then release the result under a non-free license. Even if you implement those features as well, you aren't playing on a level playing field. You have to support all of the software and they only have to support their small additions. The end result is that they can offer a product with a value-add at a lower cost than you can. You are essentially competing with yourself.

Of course you can decide not to release your code under a free software license, but that rather defeats the purpose of running a free software project ;-)

Looking at it another way, more permissive licences grant more options to downstream users than copyleft licenses. It doesn't make sense to argue that you are offering only copyleft licenses to benefit those downstream users individually (and I know of nobody who makes that claim). Instead, the argument is that it is better for the group that everybody has equal restrictions and can't use proprietary code to gain an advantage over everyone else.

This is actually one of the reasons why if anyone asks me to assign copyright for my side projects over for work, I'm happy to do so: on the provision that all of my work is licensed under the GPL. It barely matters to me at that point who owns the copyright (though to protect yourself further you should ensure that no one person has copyright over the entire work).

IMHO, although the choice to write free software at all is often ideological, the choice of using a copyleft license or not is usually pragmatic -- at least among those who understand why copyleft licenses are written the way they are.

Correct. We are pragmatic-focused. The communities asked for better integration with GitHub, so we provided it. (nothing to do with non/copyleft licensing regimes)

Mind you, we maintain private mirrors and have restrictions on some of the GitHub access/workflows (eg. ICLA on file, and 2FA required). We still need to track provenance, and must be able to operate independently, if it comes to that.

-- Greg Stein

Let me tell you, as a little data point, I use BSD licenses and I'm ideological enough not to want to host anything on a walled-garden now run by Microsoft.