> accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important"
Based on my life experience from the last 15 years, you should assume that any "open source" code you leave online is going to be plagiarized heavily. It's unfortunate, but the hard truth for a billion different reasons.
In general, the legal peril of contaminated copyrights made closed-source desktop coding less lucrative. Most if not all current desktop applications from major commercial vendors is at least in part server hosted, or online subscription based.
It is simply a shift from shovel-ware to a service model, and does what DRM did for the music businesses.
Personally, I often release under Apache license as both a gift and a curse... Given it is "free" for everyone including the competition, and the net gain for bandits is negative three times the time cost (AI obfuscation would also cost resources.)
The balance I found was not solving corporate "hard" problems for free, and focusing on features that often coincidentally overlap with other community members. Thus, our goals just happen to align, and I am glad if people can make money recycling the work. =3
Why bandits are not as relevant as people assume:
"The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" (Carlo M. Cipolla)
That’s awesome that you were able to make it work. But not everyone has the ability, either logistically or financially (or both), to enforce copyrights on open source code. So we should assume there will be some big bad actors who will absolutely take advantage of that.
Indeed, but the Apache license is quite different from BSD or GPL v3.
In my opinion, less restrictions on all users naturally fragments any attempt to lock-down generic features in the ecosystem.
Submarine Patent attacks using FOSS code as a delivery mechanism is far more of a problem these days, as users often can't purchase rights even if trying to observe legal requirements. The first-to-file laws also mean published works may be captured even if already in the public domain.
It is a common error to think commercial entities are somehow different from the university legal outreach departments. Yet they often offer the same legal peril, and unfeasible economic barriers to deployment.
Based on my life experience from the last 15 years, you should assume that any "open source" code you leave online is going to be plagiarized heavily. It's unfortunate, but the hard truth for a billion different reasons.