Linux

fyi: GNU coreutils are licensed GPL, not AGPL.

there is so much other confusion in this thread, i can't even 🤦

Or on the flip side, they want usage to be pervasive so they win. I mean come on man it's like "move this file" and "make this directory".

these applications aren't rocket science and providing them under a license that people will use outside of the hardcore Linux space is just good marketing.

The unfortunate reality is that a significant proportion of software engineers (and other IT folks) are either laissez-faire "libertarians" who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL, or "apolitical" tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.

To these folks, the MIT/BSD licenses have fewer restrictions, and are therefore more free, and are therefore more better.

For me, my personal projects are generally MIT licensed. I generally don't like "restrictions" on licenses, even if those "restrictions" are requiring others to provide their source and I want as many people to use my projects as possible, I don't like to restrict who uses it, even if it's just small/home businesses who don't want to publish the updated source code. Although, I admit, I'm not a huge fan of large corporations potentially using my code to generate a profit and do evil things with it, but I also think that's not going to be very common versus the amount of use others could get from it by having it using MIT who might not be able to use it otherwise with AGPL.

With that said, though, I have been starting to come around more to AGPL these days.

Its simple: its to exploit it in a corporate setting. I license under MIT because a lot of my things are of small convenience, but never without debating the ethics of why I am licensing it.

GNU is the enemy to capitalism and if you need more proof, look at what Apple has done with LLVM/Clang and CUPS. We need GNU more than ever.

Canonical still licenses most of their stuff under GPL3, including new stuff. The license (other than it being open) was probably not even a consideration in deciding to experiment with uutils.

If you're developing software for a platform that doesn't allow users to replace dynamic libraries (game consoles, iOS, many embedded/commercial systems), you won't be able to legally use any GPL or AGPL libraries.

While I strongly agree with the motives behind copyleft licenses, I personally never use them because I've had many occasions where I was unable to use any available library for a specific task because they all had incompatible licenses.

I release code for the sole purpose of allowing others to use it. I don't want to impose any restrictions on my fellow developers, because I understand the struggle it can bring.

Even for desktop programs, I prefer MIT or BSD because it allows others to take snippets of code without needing to re-license anything.

Yes I understand that means anyone can make a closed-source fork, but that doesn't bother me.
If I wanted to sell it I might care, but I would have used a different license for a commercial project anyway.

Bruh instead of all this speculation, you guys could have just looked it up.

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/discussions/4358#discussioncomment-8027681

it's been a trend for a while unfortunately. getting rid of the gpl is the motivation behind e.g. companies sponsoring clang/llvm so hard right now. there are also the developers that think permissive licenses are "freer" bc freedom is doing whatever you want /s. they're ideologically motivated to ditch the gpl so they'll support the change even if there's no benefit for them, financial or otherwise.

Here's a fun idea, let's fork these MIT-based projects and licence them under the AGPL :-)

Honestly it's probably just because so many devs are involved more in their code and don't want to worry about the nuances and headaches involved in licensing. MIT is still open source.