> Corporations can’t use code from GPL projects without contributing to them in some way. Once the license is changed to MIT through a Rust rewrite, the project is free to be used for whatever purpose benefits corporations the most.
Counterpoint: people at corporations who want to contribute to OSS that is GPL licensed often cannot because the legal risks of doing so is too high for many corporations to bear. MIT / Apache licensed software doesn't have this problem. Yes, you might have that software internally forked and used and see that as a net loss, but more often you'll likely find that a company does not want to own their own fork of an open source product and actually contributes back. GPL is friction there, and its supposed benefits seem (at least in my limited experience in 20 something years in the industry) don't seem to outpace this downside. (I put my money where my mouth is on this and release all my OSS as MIT/Apache generally).
Obviously big things like the Linux kernel or other fundamental tooling this doesn't apply, but for anything smaller the GPL is bad.
Counterpoint: people at corporations who want to contribute to OSS that is GPL licensed often cannot because the legal risks of doing so is too high for many corporations to bear. MIT / Apache licensed software doesn't have this problem. Yes, you might have that software internally forked and used and see that as a net loss, but more often you'll likely find that a company does not want to own their own fork of an open source product and actually contributes back. GPL is friction there, and its supposed benefits seem (at least in my limited experience in 20 something years in the industry) don't seem to outpace this downside. (I put my money where my mouth is on this and release all my OSS as MIT/Apache generally).
Obviously big things like the Linux kernel or other fundamental tooling this doesn't apply, but for anything smaller the GPL is bad.