"We" also stopped caring. People used to prefer GPL over MIT-style licenses for ideological reasons. That thought you are having now, namely that "ideology" is

"We" also stopped caring. People used to prefer GPL over MIT-style licenses for ideological reasons. That thought you are having now, namely that "ideology" is a dirty word, is a symptom of the same change. OSS development moving to internet and hardware companies is the most direct cause, as for them MIT-licensing makes sense (in the sense that others need to use it to be an option for them). But, increasingly, the people writing the software, at those companies and elsewhere, not just prefer MIT over GPL; they actively don't have an opinion and, in many cases, not even an understanding of the issue, or, worst case, the basics of copyright.[0] Some of this is simply due to most of the salient issues being decisively won or, at least, being replaced by a solid truce: Linux is everywhere but Microsoft still flourishes. Other software companies have either also found out that co-existence is possible. Or they no longer exist/no longer have the power (Netscape, SCO, Oracle), or never had the chance to get started in this environment (that httpd you are not paying for). Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google were never threatened. Thus, nobody is fighting Open Source, and the need to defend it has seized to be a motivating factor to get acquainted with the old ways of lawfare. But growing up without such challenges leads to a generation trying to find meaning. Having lost ideals of freedom to an assumption of such, they've found much the same ideas as other bored generations: getting rich and, along the way, maybe finding some group or other to occasionally hate-stomp into the curb for shits and giggles. So they're now running GPUs as space- and world-heaters, while whatever capability for political thought they have is busy balancing their love of Ayn Rand and Jordan Peterson with their hatred of women and the New York Times. 0: Note how there was never a thought expended to any moral or legal issues with the use of vast datasets of text, photos, or music to create text-, photo-, or music-generating AI models. But when someone started doing the same to source code, the possibility that their creative use of fopen to open a file provoked outrage usually reserved for female reddit-CEOs or game journalists. Free Software, for someone writing software, was about giving others such freedoms. This was altruism in its purest form (it's in the dictionary close to alt-right, if someone wants to look it up).