I always found this stance puzzling. If the point of open source is to give your code to the public, why do people get upset when corporations do exactly what you told them they could do?

If you didn't want to give it to everyone, you shouldn't have chosen that license.

And if you choose a non-commercial license, people get upset that it's "not technically open source because the OSI says so" as if they are somehow the arbiter of this (or even should be). It's not like anyone owns the trademark to the term "open source" for software either.

Ironically, I've seen a lot of people in the last several years quit open source entirely and/or switch to closed source.

> why do people get upset when corporations do exactly what you told them they could do?

A lot of people have been taught `corporations == bad`, part of the anti-capitalism efforts taught to our youth for a couple generations.

Yes I understand... but they already knew that the license explicitly allows this, and they already knew companies regularly take advantage of FOSS without giving back, so I'm not sure why they were expecting to get lucky or something.

To me this is just like getting upset when someone forks your open source project. Which ironically I've seen happen a LOT. Sometimes the original developer/team even quits when that happens.

It's like... they don't actually want it to be open source, they want to be the ONLY source.

Because they don't think about it deeply - that's why reminders are necessary. They think they're only donating to people with similar attitudes to themselves. xGPL licenses (SSPL included) are the license family most similar to that...

... but MIT is what corporations told them they want. There has been a low-level but persistent campaign against xGPL in the past several years and the complaints always trace back to "the corporation I work for doesn't like xGPL." No individual free software developer has a problem with xGPL (SSPL not included).

> No individual free software developer has a problem with xGPL

I do... I consider it the opposite of freedom. I think it places severe restrictions on your project that make it hard/impossible for some people (like companies) to use, especially if your project contains lots of code from other people that make it really hard/impossible to try to re-license if one day you decide you like/need money (assuming you have no CLA, I don't like those either).

But I also realize there's different kinds of freedom... freedom TO vs freedom FROM.

Some want the freedom TO do whatever they want... and others want freedom FROM the crazy people doing whatever they want.

I wish there was a happy medium but centrism doesn't seem to be very popular these days.

Which part of the GPL do you consider to be a "severe restriction" that "makes your project impossible to use"?

I agree that you can't legally take a bunch of GPL code and relicense it as proprietary. That's the point.

Freedom to/from is a false dichotomy; most rights can be expressed equivalently in either "to" or "from" form.

It is not conspiracy, it is human nature.

Bernard shaw put it best:

    If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.