Slop.

Yeah, I remember having multiple conversations with other STEM bros about this, even back in the first Trump term. My argument was always that I should care much more about American software spying on me because they directly give that data to the US government, and the US government is the one that can arrest me, send goons to my house, can shut my bank account, etc. What is the Chinese government going to do to me with the info? And they just got really mad but couldn't refute me.

It's part of why I hate selfhosting communities even though I've been spending a lot of time on the hobby this year. Libertarian techbro babble and AI worship clogs every conversation. Every genuinely good tool seems to have some AI bullshit stuffed into it - sure it's usually optional but frankly I hate that it's there in the first place.

It's honestly kind of weird because at its core FOSS is very much a leftist ideology yet these spaces are filled with far right techbros.

There needs to be a massive cultural shift in the tech space and fast.

Copy left turns copyright into a tool of collective ownership among the working class, tech oligarchs hate this, so they invented permissive licenses that essentially force workers into giving free labor to companies with no mechanism for giving back.

GitHub, owned by MS, offers the permissive MIT/Expat license as the default, so users are pushed into not fighting for their rights or having a class consciousness in the first place.

It's not really drama more than its techbros bootlicking capitalists and giving their labor away rather than ensuring it remains collectively owned and operated.

i haven't gotten much sleep and it's really early so apologies if i misunderstood the question. very broadly, there's two kinds of open source licenses: copyleft and permissive. generally, permissive licenses like MIT allow any usage of the code, including by copyrighting your own contributions or including it in copyrighted works. copyleft licenses require additions to the code to be open sourced too. this was a problem for apple when GNU code updated from GPLv2 to v3, which iirc added the restriction that any package that included licensed programs also had to be copyleft. this was a problem because apple had packaged a lot of GPL programs with macOS, so now they haven't been updated since 2007

Hate to break it to you but:

I used to work in software and several times we'd use something, I'd check the license and read something about how companies are required to pay for it, I'd ask a senior coworker "do we have a commercial license?" and they'd read the license and say we didn't need it because of (legal technical mumbo jumbo I didn't understand) and I, junior dev, overworked and precariously positioned, would just take their word for it. In retrospect I think what actually happens is these for profit corps spit in the face of licenses like that and will just try to get away with as much as they can because the odds of getting caught are low and who has the resources to sue them and make them pay?

This article may be enlightening: Why I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses

If Google are scared enough by it to tip toe around then I'm going to promote it. Also there exist organizations that protect the enforcement of these licenses, like the Software Freedom Conservancy. Or you know, specialized lawyers like the Software Freedom Law Center.

I still believe that a "Fuck you!" in the form of the GPL license is good enough to stave off a lot of corps.