The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle.
If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.
Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. Using software that has requires people to contribute back is a huge liability, and hurts adoption, which is the most important metric for herdr right now.
They're right, but they're presenting it in a way as if the toxicity of AGPL is the actual truth, and not just the opinion of greedy corporations.
Being toxic to greedy corporations but beneficial to everyone else is the point of the GPL licenses.
But it’s not only toxic to the greedy corporations but all the others as well, hence
No. There's no restriction of usage in the (A)GPL. Anyone, including big corps, can use AGPL software. Preventing them to use the software is not the point neither. The point is trying to ensure end user freedom.
They just choose avoid agpl software. Their loss. Unfortunately they also spread FUD on this and many commenters here happily convey it.
Why is it toxic for me to need to push my code to a git repo if I start using it in my services, if I'm not trying to act as a for-profit corporation?
You can totally make profits by selling services based on AGPL code btw, it's completely fine. As long as you redistribute your derivative work as AGPL too.
There's nothing toxic in the AGPL for you as long as you don't want to make that code proprietary (even without making profits)
How so? You might be thinking of SSPL.
Seems like the path is to use LLMs to launder code from VC funded efforts and their public codebases into codebases with a copyleft license. Otherwise you have to wait for the rug pull before taking action (Terraform and Vault->OpenTofu and OpenBao). It is fair use to train and create derivative works after all, as courts have ruled so far.
You can just take someone else's permissively licensed code and relicense it AGPL, or even proprietary if you want to. Corporations want it proprietary but the same trick works for copyleft.
For bonus points make sure your fork has better SEO than the original, so when someone who heard it's permissive embeds it in a proprietary product, you can sue them.
Was assuming worse case scenario from a licensing compatibility and copyright perspective.