Imagine being ok with trillion dollar companies using opensource code you wrote, for free.
Imagine if the people who work at those companies aren't your enemy. But instead are potential customers and potential collaborators, who see value in your work and want it to succeed.
Imagine if there was a good implementation of some idea, expressed as code. And we can all share and contribute to that single good implementation to avoid pointless work and avoid fragmentation. Imagine people from all across the world contributing both financially and via bug reports and pull requests to making that implementation succeed.
This fear of being exploited by big companies seems to motivate a lot of people in the free software world, and personally I find it pretty odious. Why shouldn't big businesses use my code? The better opensource companies (Google, new Microsoft, Facebook, etc) contribute back to the community in all sorts of ways; and I consider that a net positive on the world.
I've seen this fear show up for decades in all sorts of contexts, and I think I disagree with it every time. For example:
- A few years ago I was involved in a big argument over the licence for OpenStreetMaps. There were essentially two camps: the "Oh no what if (big evil corp) uses our community mapping data to make their map better" camp, who wanted a restrictive anti-company license. And people like me who just wanted to give a gift of mapping data to the world.
- This is the gap between GNU GPL (especially GPL3) and BSD/MIT licenses.
As an opensource maintainer, I do have a problem with people who work at big companies expecting me to volunteer my time responding to issues on github. I'd like big companies who file issues to contribute financially in exchange for my attention.
But if they don't pay, I'm more than happy for them to use my code. I made it for everyone. I'd really like it if fewer people needed to reinvent the wheel for silly licensing reasons.