No thanks. Belonging to a community and helping it grow is important for happiness. Community building (and empowering users) is the main point of copyleft.

Permissive licenses are equivalent to unpaid labor in the eyes of SaaS companies and other freeloaders.

I've dealt with enough GPL crusaders. They're the most unhappiest bunch. I love the philosophy of FreeBSD. Old school Berkeley liberatarianism.

> Permissive licenses are equivalent to unpaid labor in the eyes of SaaS companies and other freeloaders.

Or... you could be less resentful (and therefore happy) and think about helping the 'small guy' make it out and compete with large companies. I sometimes forget that we're on a startup tech forum.

I know you're not saying this, but in general I am fed up with the idea that anything commerical == evil. How the hell is it evil to build something, improve the world, provide value to others and get paid to put food on the table for your family? If you were to survey people that work in private companies, they're just like you and I. Normal people. They have not a shred of evil in them.

That said, ethics is important. I’m down with shaming and naming (or sueing) anyone that violates T&C of a license, GPL or BSD, doesn’t matter.

> think about helping the 'small guy' make it out and compete with large companies

The small guy is free and very welcome to use GPLed code.

> I know you're not saying this, but in general I am fed up with the idea that anything commerical == evil.

Yes, I'm not saying this. On the contrary, I have bills to pay and I'm paid to develop software. One reason more not to give away gifts to freeloaders.

> That said, ethics is important.

And yet you also said "you could be less resentful"...

Sorry for the offtopicness but could you please email [email protected]? I want to send you a repost invite.

Worrying about

> Permissive licenses are equivalent to unpaid labor in the eyes of SaaS companies and other freeloaders.

Is a way to unhappiness. I MIT/BSD stuff and no worry about who uses it and how much money they make. The attitude above is like given to poor people at the sour kitchen and then getting angry if they make it out of poverty, become successful, and don't follow in your foot steps. What they do after I've given them the soup is irrelevant.

But the point of a soup kitchen is to give without expecting any RoI, not even non-monetary return.

If I want to build a community of people who upstream patches for a project, copyleft does it better than saying patches are not required.

MIT is like a soup kitchen because soup kitchens are like MIT. I don't want to work in a soup kitchen.

> If I want to build a community of people who upstream patches for a project, copyleft does it better than saying patches are not required

I'm confident that you can't back that up with any facts. MIT/BSD projects are doing just fine at community and patches.

> The attitude above is like given to poor people at the sour kitchen and then getting angry if they make it out of poverty

Absolutely not. A correct comparison is volunteering at a soup kitchen while see someone hoards the food and sells it back to homeless people and pockets all the profit.

And sometimes even takes credit for the quality of the food.

GPL is part of why SaaS happened. It doesn’t prevent commercial use and it doesn’t require distributing source code if the user never gets an executable. SaaS is the textbook way to work around the GPL.

And thus, GPL has evolved to match?

Sort of, with AGPL.

No, there's AGPL for that.