Context:
Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”) like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.
Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.
Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that’s suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.
Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.
I think you’re putting a lot of faith in people when you say that. When’s the last time you properly obeyed a license when copyijg and pasting from Stack Overflow? When’s the last time you think the average dev did?
Also, no hard feelings about the presumptuous thing. Idk why I got defensive.
And as an aside, I think I’ve heard that in some jurisdictions there is no concept of public domain and in others you cannot willfully put things into it. So licenses like CC0 or the awfully named Unlicense are better alternatives. (Bad name because Unlicense and Unlicensed are so close in spelling but wildly different.)