Supporting FOSS
there was a period of time in my life where i really liked and appreciated the GNU ideals, especially during high school. software should be open source, and your licensed forced all the participants and people that use it, to also be open source.
bush was president then. microsoft was the bad guy. gmail was invitation only. firefox took out a full page ad in the ny times to list all their supporters. i used linux everywhere, all the time.
open source was important.
and then the times, they went a changing. the iphone was released. obama was president. apple and microsoft became sorta good. javascript was cool, and actually useful. macbooks were everywhere. i definitely got sucked into the apple ecosystem, it was convenient and felt fine.
open source felt less important. i tended to utilize the MIT license for things, which was very permissive. i didn’t care who could use my software (notably because, nobody did lol).
but those good times feel like they’re over.
trump is president again, elon musk is laying off every federal employee he can. national parks are threatened. google is now doing evil apparently.
i feel like i can’t really support what’s in “shareholder interest” because overwhelmingly, it’s inhumane.
so, yea. it’s a small thing, but if you use my software, we will be using GNU Affero GPL. why? because code should be open source. and especially if it’s running in the wild, folks should be able to see it and modify. but mostly, they should be able to verify it does what folks expect it to do, and not sell out our humanity.
am i still writing non-GPL code in my day job? yea, unfortunately. we’ll see how long i stay employed.