If some company wants to keep their code closed

That's the whole point, you're leveraging the use of the commons so that it's less feasible to keep your code closed. If they want to keep their code closed, they can spend a lot more manhours building everything from scratch.

This is a hypothetical that has no clear bearing connection to common practice.

In other words, I could just reverse this to contradict it and have equal weight to my hypothetical: devs should always use GPL, because if their software gets widely adopted to the point where companies are forced to use it, it's better that it's copyleft.

Yeah, as if the authors had no idea what terms the license has....

Taking without giving is always viewed negatively in social settings.

Maybe "taking advantage of" is wrong but then again, it is a dick move anyway.

It's a little different than that, isn't it? More like: " look at what I built, here's a step by step guide that makes it work. Do with it whatever you want." Some people want to use it for their job. Others might use it for personal use, or to build more open source projects.

This person takes advantage of people who are unaware that they could just get it for free as well.

However, if this person is putting in an effort to sell this item (like advertisement or creating a platform to distribute this item more easily) then I don't see anything wrong in charging money for that.

That's not really a common situation though. Sure, people might use the BSD license on something they did as a hobby, or just to learn things. But, the scenario described here is more like:

A group of people all have the same little problem, and they work together to come up with a solution for it. They solve the main problem, but their solution has a few rough edges and there are similar problems they didn't solve, but they're not motivated to keep working on it because what they have is good enough for their current needs. So, they put out some flyers describing how to do what they did, and inviting anybody who's interested to keep working on improving their fix.

A company comes along, sees the info, and builds a tool that solves the problem but not quite as well, and for a small fee. They spend tons of money promoting their solution, drowning out the little pamphlet that the original guys did. They use as much IP protection as possible, patenting their designs, trademarking the look and feel, copyrighting the instructions, etc. Often they accidentally(?) issue legal threats or takedown notices to people who are merely hosting the original design or original pamphlets.

Maybe the original inventor didn't get screwed in this scenario, but you could say that the public did.

I once read that the license should be smaller than your code. Gives me a good baseline:

• Permissive license for small projects and little tests

• Copyleft license for big projects

Well, ideally you're choosing your license based on the cases where it differs from others and not the majority of times where it doesn't make a difference.

Someone aiming to make Free software should use a copyleft license that protects the four freedoms, instead of hoping people abide by the honor system.

Also, no one can 100% accurately predict which of their projects will get big. Sure, a radical overhaul of TCP has good odds, but remember left-pad? Who could have foreseen that? Or maybe the TCP revision still never makes it big: QUIC and HTTP/3 are great ideas, and yet they are still struggling to unseat HTTP/2 as the worldwide standard.

To an extent I agree with this, but "Once upon a time, this guy licensed his code under BSD instead of GPL and basically it's his fault the Intel Management Engine exists" is definitely a step too far

Yes. But it's despite.

We have a scanner that does that on every build.

It blocks builds for dependencies with

• licenses not acceptable to Legal
• serious or critical vulnerabilities.
• political messages, even if you agree with them
• we may also add a criteria to block non-release dependencies.

As a developer, you’re free to use anything that works

I have yet to figure out how my company views contributing back to open source. I don’t know of anyone actively doing that, but it turns out we host a few originals of open source. I’ve been trying to improve development processes, get tools and dependencies up to date ….. but then I ran into things where it’s a bigger change because of the downstream opensource dependencies and because it’s not really owned by the company

Here is a guide from the GNU website: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html

Delete the current LICENSE file in your repository and replace it with the new one.

You don't have to put your name, year etc anywhere, the license is valid for the entire repo. You are not filing for an IP, it's just a usage license.

Note that all the legal jargon is not necessary, you can write one yourself as long as you make it clear what you allow and what you don't allow.

I.e. "don't be a dick" requires elaboration, "do not use my code if you intend to make money off of it or parts of it" is clear and legally binding.