ignorance is one thing, but it’s a whole nother level of loser behaviour to intentionally do unpaid work for big tech companies in your free time
You’re making it for fun. You’ve achieved your desired fun, and lost nothing if some rando takes it and makes another fun project, or big mega corp uses it.
What’s gonna stop them from just stealing it anyways? Why would they care about Joe Shmoe when they have infinite number the lawers you have? Also AI kinda makes this irrelevant because it will rewrite the code in a way that’s probably not protected, or at least provide enough shielding that their 10000 lawyers will.
Also also, what about all the mega corps that already use linux? That’s free an open source and they’re free to run their proprietary code on it. If you’ve ever contributed to linux, or any tool that’s built into a distro you’re not this supposed loser who’s done free work for a big tech company. It’s silly to complain about this.
GPL enforcement has, in fact, been very successful so far. I recommend this Wikipedia entry.
And then there is the very successful lawsuit from the Software Freedom Conservancy against Vizio.
“Unpaid work” is pretty much all OSS development. “Here’s a thing I made, anyone can use it for whatever they want as long as they give credit” is a very simple philosophy. Not everybody who works on OSS is opposed to the existence of closed source commercial software, and rather a lot of people don’t like viral licenses like the GPL. Really out of line to call people who contribute their time and effort to making free software available to everyone losers just because you disagree with their choice of license.
I take it that you’re in the first camp
You’re doing it for yourself/for fun/to better humanity
If some corporate fucks want to abuse that then it’s their problem not yours
Publishing it under GPL does benefit the humanity because any improvement on it will be also available to everyone. Letting corps take your work and put a monetary/legal block for people to use freely doesn’t seem like benefiting humanity that much.
What if your open source code is awful and is unusable, and a company comes in and makes it actually useful? What if it’s used in a medical device that saves hundreds of peoples lives every day?
You’ve now gone from free but unusable, to also fee an unusable, but in addition to paid and actually useful.
