this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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Are you a (potential) contributor?
I don’t think it matters.
They are certainly a member of the community.
Choosing MIT over GPL is a political decision that empowers corporations at the expense of the community.
Yah companies can (and sometimes do) choose to give back to the community with MIT projects.
GPL/AGPL/LGPL/MPL 2.0 ensure that they do give back when they take.
I just don’t trust companies enough to use MIT.
There is no "community". The GPL itself was explicitly created for the freedom(s) of the individual. The faux-"community" is just an attempt to create an "identity" in hopes of encouraging people to contribute, or at least advocate. And many projects don't even like being advocated for outside of potential contributor pools (a few hate any level of advocacy outright).
Incidentally, liberally licensed software, on average, tend to value adoption at least as much as direct contribution, and thus would usually appreciate advocacy more.
Or a practical one, or ..
Everything can be argued to have a political aspect to it. But what people (often non-contributors) have in mind ignores many relevant technical/practical aspects that may play a role.
Open-source license choice is practically near the bottom of an endless list of things that actually empower corporations. Most of the empowerment comes from the inherent nature of the system, which is something software licenses, GPL included, don't even pretend to try to fix.
But that's not why I asked.
Do you know how many liberally licensed essential packages are installed in your system right now, and can you name them? From my experience, most of the people who quibble about this don't and can't.
* Not that it matters, but I personally use AGPL or MPLv2 for my own stuff.