this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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For your second part:
A lot of open source projects exist to make people's lives easier at work. The people developing these projects are often also people who have jobs as devs and have a use for the projects. It just so happens that it's easier to use these libraries at work and share them with others when they're more permissively licensed, and there are community benefits when people all contribute back to it.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to go the AGPL route and forcing everyone into open source, but that makes it much harder to use these tools at work, which often kills the motivation behind building them in the first place.
I tend to be of the opinion that community tools should be GPL/AGPL, while libraries can be anything. It works as a compromise for both - so devs can have an easier time at work while also forcing contributions back to community-developed tools.
Edit: I should also mention dual licensed AGPL/paid commercial. That model is probably my favorite, but unfortunately uncommon.
Fully agreed, though I must say this, if you truly believe in the spirit of free software and, let's also be honest and add, can afford not to bend for the convenience of others (maybe you get funded through donations and/or grants), then you have the opportunity to make a piece of software so good, be it application or library, that it'll be hard for competition to come up with something better and proprietary, that's how it is for those instances where companies were sued for using them and not providing the source, e.g. Linux and John Deere is the last I remember.
It is that nature of copyleft that the more it spreads, the more it will enable for a culture shift, when people are faced with the inevitable conflict of the idea of keeping everything behind closed doors and not being allowed to if they want to take the easy way out, they might give it an actual thought or they'll try to be unfair and use without giving back, showing their true greedy colours. I'm not a purist by any means, as much as I'd like to, but that is the kind of world I'd like to live in