this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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Good question.
Failure to copyleft contributes to "embrace extent extinguish", which many of us feel is a constant threat to the ecosystem of our favorite tools.
For example, Google can make a better expanded XMPP client, and keep extending it until the open XMPP clients are no longer compatible - drawing most of the userbase away from the free open ecosystem. (Source: I fell for that shit, and I lost track of dear friends who I used to regularly chat with over XMPP.)
MIT license also risks security patches being written by big corporations for their own use, and not getting contributed back to the commons.
I'm not really sure these risks particularly apply for a 'cp' variant, honestly.
But I'm onboard now with not making anything unnecessarily MIT license.
Google could have done that from the spec though. Google is doing that with chromium despite the source being entirely available
even agpl wouldn't protect this tool in most cases if a company didn't want to contribute back, since it's probably just used in server side scripts and such. also companies aren't required to upstream stuff, just make source available, which means hard to discover ftp site with a pile of code.
sure something more copyleft is better for large, more commercial projects, but this in particular probably gets more patches from the extra use in the rust community from MIT than they would forcing companies to open source changes