As mentioned in another discussion, I used to be a Copyleft Zealot, but I've come to realize an absolutist insistence on "Free as in Freedom" and the "Four Free

As mentioned in another discussion, I used to be a Copyleft Zealot, but I've come to realize an absolutist insistence on "Free as in Freedom" and the "Four Freedoms", without allowing businesses a viable path to profitability, is an obsolete attitude. It has become incredibly easy and cheap to distribute copies of large programs, even as a service over the internet. Sure, hobbyist projects and foundations for FOSS software still exist, but important infrastructure projects like Mongo, Redis, and now Elastic have all recently changed their licenses from "true" FOSS to "some rights reserved". One might argue that the point of FOSS is not to make money. But GNU/FSF have said repeatedly that it's OK to "sell" your software. How do you do that when a FAANGMO can easily out-scale you and put you out of business? If I were to start an actual software company, I would give very serious consideration to licenses like Polyform[0] over "true" FOSS, at least for the important, money-making parts where it would be impossible to compete with a FAANGMO. [0] https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/