As a person who shares OPs concerns, (A)GPL is acceltable, in v2 or v3 form. Anything permissive is not, because allows a closed fork, which everybody wants to do to rob free software ecosystem to undo what has been done over these years.

Because "monies".

Personally I haven’t seen this motive across any of the organizations I’ve worked at. They usually seem more interested in minimizing maintenance costs, which means they try to upstream changes where possible or practical.

What would motivate a company to fork and keep private changes to a core GNU utility like chmod?

Any hardware company which would want to block 3rd party firmware from loading or executing on their systems. They can add a small handshake code to every binary on that system to authenticate via TPM or the processor's embedded secure element on start.

They don't need to make extensive changes. Pull the latest, patch, compile, burn to FW. TaDa!

IOW, TiVoization 2.0. GPL2 makes it very hard already, but GPL3 makes it impossible.

With permissive licenses, it's very possible.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

> What would motivate a company to fork and keep private changes to a core GNU utility like chmod?

Maybe ask these folks: https://www.busybox.net/license.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox

While I don't share OP's concern, I believe AGPL is much more preferable, yes.

Having both available means that someone can use it under the MIT license to produce a proprietary version.

For me the most important thing is the rights of the end user. So I consider the AGPL the best of all licenses I am aware of. And hey, if Google bans AGPL software then it must be doing something right.