The author said he was proud of this outcome and nervous at how widely his hobby project will be deployed. That sounds like the ambition of many open source authors and a win. Might never have happened with GPL.
This has been debated a lot already. It depends whose freedom we are talking about. It is overly simplistic to define MIT as more free.
MIT license is absolutely not 'more free' than the GPL.
In fact, MIT means you give up effective ownership and control. You lose control and contributions.
And what do you get for that loss of control? Exposure. Or, in this and many other cases similar, you get diddly shit. Some company paracitizes your code, sometimes even demands SOC questionnaires and 'do this bug NOW', and other abuse.
> Not everybody has to be chasing money in all their activities.
Talk about missing the point! This was all about money. It was about a job at the company where the code is being used in a production manner. And they didn't even bother to give an interview.
And not many of us are independently wealthy, and can do things that we want with no monetary care. And, most FLOSS devs aren't that. Instead, they're being used as unpaid stepping stones so some overvalued AI hypesquad can vibecode (or slotmachine programming) faster.
> The author said he was proud of this outcome and nervous at how widely his hobby project will be deployed. That sounds like the ambition of many open source authors and a win. Might never have happened with GPL.
That's where I hope the author relicenses as LGPL and proprietary, and doesn't give Anthropic any more free professional work.
And if it never would have happened with the GPL, gasp, they would have had to pay developers to create it.
And until I'm independently wealthy, I too will license AGPL. If you're making money on my stuff, I want a cut. Simple as that.
Isn't that what true freedom is?
You can argue that more freedom is a net burden for both the individual and society (tragedy of the commons), but that doesn't negate the aspect of it being more free to begin with.
>And not many of us are independently wealthy, and can do things that we want with no monetary care.
Indeed. But not many people contribute to any kind of OS community to begin with (regardless of the license). I would like to one day, but then the industry laid me and hundreds of thousands off in the last few years and those plans were delayed.
There definitely is a certain level of privilege in being able to provide knowledge to others on the side. Even morose if you're part of an organization that pays you to do so.
A. So much for "Not everybody has to be chasing money..." as missing the point
B. What hubris to claim that just because you wrote something it is now "yours" in any meaningful way. The copyright lobby has infected everywhere.
I'm certainly not there.
Also more curious, is the AGPL doesn't affect humans doing stuff. It affects companies when they grab, modify, and host and not share contributions. Read about anti-TIVOization. That's why the AGPL. I'm guessing you know this, and why you're attacking my viewpoints as 'missing the point'.
And yes, copyright is everywhere. And the GPL has some of the sanest terms to reuse, as long as you follow the requirement. And the GPL also further grows the ecosystem, due to virality.
But Anthropic wasn't exactly submitting code either, were they? In my world, parasites get antiparasitic drugs.
> If you're making money on my stuff, I want a cut. Simple as that.
It's clear that you're motivated by personal compensation for your work, which is fine, but it means you shouldn't license it as MIT. Other people are motivated by knowing that their work is useful to others, and those people shouldn't use GPL because it hinders that aim.
