License conversations are opinionated. They're opinionated to the point that they aren't useful. People I know have been discouraged from developing their tools because of licensing arguments. If a new tool or application pops up on Github, I can expect some comment in the issues along the lines of,
You should license this! Use [insert writer's favourite license]: that way, people will use your product!
Licensing is ubiquitous, and I hate it, and I want to see it die (lol jk).
Licensing exists to make people and corps act in certain ways, according to what the developer thinks is right. It can be as simple as "Please give me credit"; or somewhat more restrictive, "You must license your shit in the same way as me." This is (IMO) of dubious morality in the case of people & absolutely moral in the case of corps. But there's a problem:
If you can't legally distinguish between two entities, it becomes tricky to bind one and not the other.
Maybe human beings care about the rules: I might stop myself from integrating some MIT-licensed tool into my own thing because of licensing considerations. More than likely, I ignore the terms for personal projects & respect them for public ones. I act within the spirit of the license, if not exactly the letter.
But when it comes to corporate greed, the fact is
And when you try to fight back, they will lawyer up. They will drag it out. They will hide their crimes behind "closed-source" and pretend they've never heard of you.
So where has licensing gotten us?
I do not care about what individual people do with my tools and writing. I am not at a point in my life where I'm making things that are useful to the corporate ecosystem. And I'm not making shit that's useful to fascists.
Thank God.
I have easy calculus and the luxury of a simple solution: no licenses. Refuse to engage with the system of intellectual property that fails to free people, or to bind corporations. Put shit out and just say fuck it.