The causality is wrong here. You chose to work for free with no reward, and _then_ companies found your work and used it. Presumably you started out working for free because it was intrinsically rewarding (otherwise: stop doing work you hate for free?).

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LtWorf 2 days ago | parent [-]

I chose to do it for free to help other people. And picking a MIT license does the opposite.

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brainwad 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Why? MIT license or public domain helps the most people, because anyone can use it. It being usable by corporations is purely additive, it can't subtract from the number of people you'd help with a copyleft license.

	▲	LtWorf 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Putting people out of jobs doesn't necessarily help them?

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knorker 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Huh? You release code so that people will have to rewrite it?

I really don't understand what your goal would be in releasing code at all, then.

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LtWorf 2 days ago | parent [-]

Did you read my comment or you just reply for the sake of it?

I release the code so that people and companies that feel like contributing to the community can use it. Companies that want to take without giving back however are mildly inconvenienced by copyleft.

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ghaff 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

How? If they don't make (and distribute) changes.

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LtWorf 2 days ago | parent [-]

Because they cannot distribute the software itself or use it for online services with AGPL

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ghaff 2 days ago | parent [-]

Distributing (however defined by a given license) unmodified software that is presumably widely available to customers may be a requirement but is also a profoundly uninteresting legal requirement.

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LtWorf a day ago | parent [-]

https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

	▲	ghaff a day ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think we're disagreeing about anything. I wasn't giving a legal opinion but lawyers, especially at large firms, are a lot more conservative about some matters than I might be for a personal project. If you have deep pockets and provide any path to those pockets, someone could sue you. I used to work for a very open source-friendly company and, while AGPL wasn't broadly verbotten and I can't quote any publicly available documents, its use was not encouraged in general. (And outside of Linux which was what it was, permissive licenses became much more common for new projects.)

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knorker a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Could you please take my question at face value?

> I chose to do it for free to help other people. And picking a MIT license does the opposite.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I want to help other people, then giving them the means to do what they want with no real restrictions is "the opposite" of that?

> Companies that want to take without giving back

So this is not about helping anyone else, but about mandating a behavior, even if that behavior is "pay it forward".