LMFO I was on the reddit thread reading this post and coudn’t believe my eyes reading the comments. We’re living truly revelation times. Like you said this is a long due wakeup call for the rest of the “uncivilized” world.

One thing I can imagine is even something like unconscious “self censorship”, choosing more permissive license to attract more people and even corporations which will hire developers…

This is the result of years of anti-copyleft propaganda which started to pay off. Now, all that corps need to do is wait for new projects and libraries to pop up and subtly (more than often openly) allocate resources to whichever project they need, or simply EEE. A much easier exercise than it was during the early years of copyleft where we could literally have a free alternate operating system to Microsoft, Apple and IBM while they were openly fighting it. Read on the Education and Government Incentives program for a reminder of what corporations are capable of.

I highly doubt these are sponsored by any big corp, just hobbyists/students that think it is interesting project to undertake that don’t care as much about the GPL as much as they care about doing something interesting to them.

I wanted to test this theory, quickly looking at the commit history you can see that although the project might have started as a hobby/student weekend project, it is currently maintained by someone with an official affiliation of director at Mozilla corp.

PS: I am not pointing the finger to any entity here, I picked this project as an example to have a discussion on this topic.

I am aware that permissive licenses became the defacto form of licensing for new projects thanks to years of propaganda from big corps and especually Microsoft, who bought Github mainly for this. I never paid too much attention until I realized the potential for Rust projects to be widely adopted for replacing a big portion of copyleft libraries. This coreutils project was just an example to make the point, it seems very convenient and it is easy to dismiss the licencing choice as a coincidence. On the long term this might have huge implications a few generations ahead when big corps don’t have to contribute nothing anymore to society. Look at what is happening with OpenCloseAI, open source models are lagging behind because there nothing equivalent to GNU/Copyleft in this field, thus we end up with a big corp mostly owned by Microsoft holding a life changing technology in its hands and hindering the progress of all society.

use homomorphism and apply it to everything:

interface Profitable {
      exploitable() --> bool
      can_organize() --> bool
}

let profitables: list[Profitable]

for entity in all_things_on_earth {
    if entity.exploitable && !entity.can_organize {
        profitables.push(entity)
    }
}

profit += sell(exploit(profitables))
capital += buy_all_you_can(profit) - (buy_politicians(profit))

Be careful with overwork try to keep life balance. I know it’s difficult when a project is done by passion but health first.

For any institution or moral entity based on profit I apply the principle of Presumption Of Guilt until proven innocent.