Will hobbyists and experimenters that has no interest in understanding licenses go out of their way to locate specific licensed code, or are they more likely to just ask the AI/agent to cobble together stuff without care of any licenses?

"The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business."

Fully agree, FOSS maintainers are - in the grand economic scheme of things - beggars high on altruism. The whole model of FOSS from the position of a non-corporate sponsored developer was already broken and with the advent of AI is now most probably broken beyond-repair. Buy-me-a-coffee with a <0.01% hit rate compared to open feature requests/gh issues on some of the more popular projects out there, all while companies like atlassian - using FOSS to run their business on for free - can charge 50k EUR for a single 1h migration call. Time is the most valuable resource one can waste, something you get to realize once all the mental gymnastics wear off(either by itself or due to less fortunate life situations)

Excuse me but as both a hobbyist and commercial software developer I say that the gpl (any version) is quite simple enough. There is no need to go all the way to bsd/mit just to get safety and clarity and freedom from encumberance.

The only people who avoid gpl and talk about mit as being the only safe option, are exactly the people no one should care about. They are the people for whom free isn't free enough, and they must steal even when it's already free.

That is not "adoption" anyone needs to care about.

Well, the language is clear enough. What's not clear are the implications of the language. And, honestly, the sensible default for a lot of companies is just not to go there. And big companies tend not to operate on hopes and prayers to avoid distracting and expensive lawsuits. Without going into details I have enough familiarity with the space to know that a lot of open source-friendly companies either avoid AGPL entirely or discourage its use.

Do you have data on that last bit, or just a guess? As a hobbyist and OSS developer I treat AGPL as a rabies infected animal. I may have uses for it, but I'll keep it EXTREMELY segregated from everything else.

I like the AGPL but don’t often use it. (I did recently license two coding harnesses I wrote as AGPL.)

A long time ago, I didn’t mind huge tech companies getting rich partially via open source, now I do. In the USA the collusion between government and big tech is starting to smell a little bit like fascism. Sorry, I have only complaints, not any good answers.

>MIT and source out on GitHub is the easiest way to build trust. You will find that some people simply "steal" your work in this arrangement, but much like with movie piracy I don't think they ever intended to compensate you or anyone else.

You've chosen the license which allows "stealing", why did you do that if you don't like that? Nobody forced you to do that, I hope.

How can I trust the person who published their code with the strict legal terms, but becomes sad when other people use their code exactly as the author said it could be used?

Every once in a while I read discussions about licenses, and puzzled every time why the author of the software chooses free license when the freedom of copying and distribution is seem to them as pirating. If the license is not suitable for you, why choose it?!

Licenses are about legal possibilities. You're looking for social/moral terms instead if I understood you correctly (something like CoC).

After many years of thinking about this, I have arrived in the exact same place. I think the SQLite team learned this in the early days, and have done very well for themselves, giving away all of their source code for the product itself, free of charge, and then having folks pay for consulting and enhancements, which they remain particularly strong at because of their closed, comprehensive regression test suite.

How does MIT build any more trust than a copyleft licence like AGPL? At the very least AGPL stops people "stealing" your work without contributing back their changes?

Almost no business relationships builds trust based on source code. It's based on whether you deliver what the other side wants.

Once you decide on a non-free license, in the FSF sense, in the DFSG sense, and in the open source sense, does the details of the license matter much? You want as many people to pay as possible, and you do not wish for others to compete with you providing this software.

It's pretty much a standard non-free commercial license, which exact wording will matter only to purchasing department of your customers. It will be inconsequential to the broader open source community. Literally thousands of those exist and the specific wording matters very little.

You might also be interested in the O'Saasy license (https://osaasy.dev/) which is in the similar vein, but simpler.

HashiCorp switched to BUSL license for their products/tools when they already had substantial market share, and they still faced MPL-licensed forks (Terraform -> OpenTofu, Vault -> OpenBao). It will be interesting to see in a few years if those tools notably cut into their share.

I'm not sure a new tool with a BUSL license will get adoption as easily.

The heat around this particular issue has cooled down a bit and I'm not sure anyone is especially happy with the state of affairs. But questions around AI have sucked a lot of the oxygen from the room for now.

This framing ignores the fact that many people pick up technologies because they want to be able to switch the vendor that is hosting it for them. If I'm hosting a LAMP stack from some shared hosting provider, it's easy for me to just move to a different hosting provider because all the software is open source and anybody can host it. This falls apart when companies choose the BUSL, which is why it's not considered OSI open source.