Linux

I'm going to continue releasing my software with a license that I deem appropriate.

For things I'm building only for myself or that I have no interest in building a community around, I couldn't give a shit what people do with it or if they contribute back. My efforts have nothing to do with them. I'm releasing it for the remote chance someone finds it useful, either commercially or personally. Partially because I've benefited from others doing the same thing.

I'm not anti-copyleft, but the only time I actually care to use something like the GPL is for projects that would be obviously beneficial to have community contributions. Things that require more effort than I can put in, or that needs diverse points of views.

I use permissive licenses not because I'm a pushover, but because I really don't care what you do with it.

You're taking an incredibly slanted position. There is a whole world of vibrant, viable, meaningful FOSS outside copyleft licenses. Even when one philosophically and politically prefers copyleft licenses, sometimes there are cases where the humanitarian or practical argument favours permissive licensing. But there are many who simply don't share your interpretation of the philosophy and politics.

One side community wants total GPL take over and one side they don't support total GPLv3 licenced Operating system like

https://codeberg.org/Ironclad/Gloire

https://ironclad-os.org/

https://ghostkernel.org/

Most Open Source software is written by corporations. The Open Source licenses are an advantage to them.

The biggest source of GPL software is probably Red Hat (IBM). They maintain most of what people think of when they think of GNU software and they wrote many of the newer GPL projects that everybody uses (like systemd).

The trend has been towards permissive licenses for a long time. The have led to more Open Source software, not less.

Look at Clang vs GCC. Clang attracts a greater diversity of corporate contribution and generates greater Open Source diversity. Zig and Rust appeared on LLVM for a reason.

What we should be worried about is the cloud. It allows big companies to outsell the little companies writing Open Source software. Neither permissive nor copyleft licenses prevent this.

It is concerning, yeah. I usually license my own software with MIT, but, not all of it, and I think GPL is very important for Linux.

Also on that topic, very interesting read:

https://lemmy.world/post/38825320