@Angle additionally, this actually applies to GPL software as well, in respect of the copyright holder; MySQL AB provided both GPL and non-GPL versions of their database, building a commercial product on top of code freely contributed by the community

@aeonofdiscord because then someone could take an open source project, make a new version thats closed source, and outcompete the open source version. Like, suppose someone made a closed source version of mastodon, cut out the federation, added new features, and then went on to become the next twitter, repeating all of twitters bad behaviour? :/

@Angle well, I mean, we saw how well that went down

but I'm unconvinced that twitter's bad behaviour has much to do with their ownership of the Twitter software; in fact, large parts of Twitter are themselves open source. capital and infrastructure are more important imo

@aeonofdiscord Aye, I agree with you on that. But that's no reason to make their things any easier for them. :/

@Angle I guess I don't think the GPL has much of an effect on that - particularly with server software, the fact that every web service is built on a huge stack of processes with varying licenses means GPL or AGPL don't present any practical barrier to any bad actor using free software for nefarious purposes

whereas those licenses do prevent individual software producers/small ISVs (like gamedevs) from reusing certain software in their own products

@Angle (sorry, I don't mean to go off, I've just been thinking about this a lot)

@aeonofdiscord No, you make a good point - it's important to know what you're sticking your license on, and what effects that might have down the line. And sometimes it's better to not use a GPL. :/

@Angle yeah, I'm def not saying there's no place for the GPL, I guess I'm just reacting to a lot of aggressively pro-GPL stuff I've been seeing on the ol TL

@aeonofdiscord Aye, fair enough. Though I think some of that was me arguing with h, wasn't it? :/

@Angle oh no, I don't think I saw that, it was more of a PSA thing about how the AGPL is great and you should use it for everything