> especially its insidious, forced MIT rewrites of popular GPL software

Is this some sort of movement?

I was aware that some Rust software had been released under permissive licenses but I didn't know it was activism besides the obvious C-is-obsolete angle.

It’s not deliberate activism. It’s two things:

Monomorphizarion makes the GPL weird.

Rust is dual licensed under Apache/MIT, and so most people choose the same as a default if they don’t feel strongly about licensing.