UPDATE: I found this issue explaining the relicensing of rust game engine Bevy to MIT + Apache 2.0 dual. Tldr: A lot of rust projects are MIT/Apache 2.0 so using those licenses is good for interoperability and upstreaming. MIT is known and trusted and had great success in projects like Godot.
ORIGINAL POST:
RedoxOS, uutils, zoxide, eza, ripgrep, fd, iced, orbtk,…
It really stands out considering that in FOSS software the GPL or at least the LGPL for toolkits is the most popular license
Most of the programs I listed are replacements for stuff we have in the Linux ecosystem, which are all licensed under the (L)GPL:
uutils, zoxide, eza, ripgrep, fd -> GNU coreutils (GPL)
iced, orbtk -> GTK, QT (LGPL)
RedoxOS -> Linux kernel, most desktop environments like GNOME, KDE etc. all licensed GPL as much as possible
The newer FOSS projects have a preference for permissive licenses like MIT. That’s due to a narrative going around that copyleft licenses like GPL are somehow ‘less free’. Apparently, GPL etc are not free enough that companies avoid such projects. And if you want your project to be adopted, you have to avoid these licenses. You can easily guess who is behind such narratives and why.
You would think so. But anti-FSF sentiment comes in different forms nowadays.
My first (and only) visit to the Mastodon world was years ago. Top post (or whatever you call them) was from some micro-celeb (who probably didn’t even code) bitching about how Stallmann caused great damage, and how the FSF’s biggest achievement was giving decades of “our” free labor to corporations. The microblogtards replying agreed of course. Needless to say, that tab didn’t stay open for long.
Social war ultras (big intersection with microblogtards) also don’t like Stallman and the FSF.
So, new developers may have chosen non-FSF licenses not only because of copyleft implications. But also because it looks and goes along better with the posturing ethics of the times. The snowball has already gotten large of course, and next-gen devs may just be going along with the choices made by their predecessors or library dependencies without knowing much about the why.
Still, there should probably be more MPLv2 in the Rust ecosystem.
I don’t completely agree with many of RMS’ stances on sexual abuse. It often feels like he is a bit tone deaf in that regard. However, the cancel campaign against him was very much motivated and they twisted his words completely out of context in several cases. I’m not going to get into the tiresome argument of if he was right or not. But one thing I noticed back then was that many involved in the campaign had clear vested and conflicting interests with undisclosed financial motives. Watching it live, it was pretty clear that the campaign was sponsored by certain big names in the industry.
The anti-FSF campaign you mentioned and the anti-copyleft propaganda I mentioned shouldn’t be seen in isolation. It might sound like a conspiracy theory, but there were clear indications of a long term corporate-funded smear campaign to attack the foundations of FOSS - a hit job, if you will. Too bad I didn’t bother to save those back then. A lot of illuminating messages were forcefully deleted.
They really took advantage of the outrage mentality of common people. Meanwhile, people took the bait and went after the small fish while being completely oblivious to the big sharks feeding the outrage.
A conspiracy theory explanation is not necessary as it:
It doesn’t take a conspiracy theory explanation to observe how classic corporate anti-FSFers are very content with social licenses (CoCs) being elevated to a position where they are considered more relevant and have more signal power than the software licenses chosen, or how many new-gen open-source contributors have no problem singing the New Microsoft (and the likes) praises… etc