In a way, (A)GPL is the proprietary license of the community. Anything that's licensed under (A)GPL will compete with corporate interests, rather than be shared

In a way, (A)GPL is the proprietary license of the community. Anything that's licensed under (A)GPL will compete with corporate interests, rather than be shared among competitors. When you have competition, you can pick a different market or you can develop a compelling alternative. In the spirit of "Commoditize Your Complement", the corporate competition realized that the value proposition these days is not really in operating systems and toolchains anymore, so they're commodify infrastructure GPL code - with MIT/BSD on the client side, e.g. clang and Fuchsia for GCC and Linux, and GPL on the server side, e.g. Amazon adding missing features to Elasticsearch and Microsoft's supporting server-side Linux. The libre-minded community can fight this commodification, but it's a lost battle. As more infrastructure becomes a commodity, competition for value-add needs to move up the stack. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are now competing in providing computing services. Facebook doesn't mind giving away tons of server-side frameworks, as long as they can continue to harvest our attention. Google and Apple are providing value in integration of devices, so their marketplaces continue to gain market share. So the question is, with operating systems being a lost cause, where can the community still compete? I can think of only a few: * Privacy: User data is part of companies' competitive advantage, so they're naturally disadvantaged in this area. Hasn't traditionally been valued highly by the masses though. * Price: Displacing expensive competition works for professional creative software such as as Krita or Blender. Doesn't generally work for cheap, user-data-financed apps though, or for operating systems. Attempts to incentivize hardware vendors with a lack of license fees proved ineffective due to the existing popularity of proprietary alternatives and the extra attention/volume that comes with it. * Convenience / UX: Not popping up annoying "Subscribe!!" dialogs has a certain value, although this may be neutralized by the extra attention that email subscriptions provide to companies, and by the possibilities that come with being able to promote only a single, well-integrated product by the same company. * Interoperability: Would only be a competitive advantage if community-controlled software had a market share that's large enough to single out non-standardized solutions such as Chromecast or anything that Apple does. Generally only valued once people are already locked in and want out, so doesn't help much. * Small scale / not profitable: Companies can't compete on stuff that they won't make money on. So far, this has been mitigated by monetizing a lack of otherwise unprofitable products via collecting user data. If the targeted market is small enough though, data-supported monetization may still not pay off while hobbyists aren't constrained by such concerns. Good starting point, but becomes less of an advantage as a project gets larger / more useful to more people. I'd include decentralization initiatives in this category, except that if we want something to be a standard protocol then there should also be open specifications and a permissively-licensed reference implementation. * Existing technological advantage: It looks to me like Linux is pretty much the only piece of GPL software that has no available licensable alternative and can't feasibly be replaced by a well-funded upstart. (Even so, Fuchsia is coming and it won't be pretty for future hardware support of Free operating systems.) Anything that doesn't provide a competitive advantage like one or more of the above won't be competitive with corporate software in the long run. If it can't or doesn't have to compete, whether you license it as (A)GPL doesn't matter, so it may as well be MIT/BSD in many cases. But maybe not in all cases!