millions of people use it. the perennial question is why does the license make people so unreasonably angry?
>there’s a reason corps tend to avoid it
it's the same reason they try to assign IP you dreamt up in the shower to themselves in perpetuity with no exceptions - a combination of corporate greed, hubris and lawyerly risk aversion.
People tend not to like it because it’s restrictive to the point of being off limits in many real world use cases. Bob works on the platform team at at GigaCorp. He’s overworked, and found a great OSS product that does exactly what he needs and could save him weeks or months of effort. Except because it’s GPL, he can’t touch it.
so it's worth the time, and thus money to pay. Therefore, if he's got a brain, he would ask for corporate money to buy a commercial license, and do away with the risks of GPL.
Except he doesn't, because the corp (or he himself) believes that it should be free somehow?
Bob could just whine at the developer, of course, for not making his day at a well paid job slightly easier.
But the only reason for such anti-GPL policies is so that the corporations can ensure their software remains proprietary, which is inherently wrong.
what's wrong with that?
If they produce their own version, then the world now has another piece of software, and this competition is going to make the ecosystem better imho.
The only problem with lenient licenses is that they allow leeching. MIT, eclipse, and apache licenses, all are basically allow free commons which others leech off as much as possible. The corps may continue to contribute, but only because they see value they could extract more than what it costs them.
I would say AGPL should be the _only_ license anyone contributing to OSS should pick. And if you own the project, make it dual licensed - a commercial offering, and AGPL. If said software is good, a commercial offering can be profit generating enough fund further development.