> and pass it off as your own

No, the MIT license requires attribution by including the original copyright notice with any distribution of the software. You can claim credit for the parts you build around it, but you can't claim to have written the MIT-licensed part.

The decision between MIT-like licenses and copyleft licenses all depend on the contextual usage of the code. Is it just some quick and dirty script I wrote to convert some obscure binary format to another obscure binary format? I literally do not care who uses it and why/where/when/how. The script was complete the day I made it, it does everything it needs to do and nothing it doesn't. School assignments fall under the same category, they were useful for that moment and will never be needed again. Writing my own linked-list in C++ stopped being useful to me the moment I turned the assignment in so I don't care who uses it. It's not anything special and licensing it any other way would (in theory) only limit someone trying to learn. Did I actually write something clever that could actually be used somewhere helpful? Is it something that I can see others would want to build upon and improve? That's definitely copyleft worthy.

"In a way, I feel like I should be a big enough person to be okay with this, but I'm not."

One of the distinctions I like to draw strongly is between "nice" and "good". They are not the same, and at times, are actively at odds with each other.

It is certainly nice to give away your software to everybody, unconditionally, and not be bothered if your code does happen to end up being a fundamental component of some multi-billion-dollar company that gives you nothing.

But I'm less convinced that's necessarily good. In a world where you must live under the assumption there are bad actors, I think it's OK to put into your license that they can't necessarily do that. It is good to prevent the exploitation of anybody, and that goodness extends to preventing the exploitation of yourself, even if you also clearly have direct personal interests of your own.

I don't think "being comfortable with being exploited" is a component of "being a big person".

On the other hand, we often bring to mind mental examples of software where we slaved away for years and years to bring some unique new product to the world, only for it to be stolen by the big bad corporation for no compensation. My verbiage above about "exploitation" probably brought that to the reader's mind as the topic of discussion. If that happens, yeah, it's bad. On the other hand, that's not really the dominant case for software. There's a lot of open source put out there that's just a few day's work, which is still plenty valuable at scale, but if someone took one of these little things and incorporated it into their product, it's not really that big a deal.

I have several such small little things and they're all BSD. If a big corporation did somehow walk off with one of them, I'd legitimately be flattered, because I know that while it may have saved them a bit of time, it certainly isn't a core component of their product and had they needed to implement something themselves it would have been a trivial fraction of their time. I know I can say I'd be flattered because to some small extent, this really has happened, and I really was flattered and appreciative, so I'm not just hypothesizing about my future emotional states. I'm well aware on all levels that my ~two weeks total effort on the project in question, which I mostly did for my own purposes and for which the open source effort was essentially a bonus, doesn't entitle me to significant compensation for a product whose size is measured in person-decades.

> there's no reason to make others redo work.

As a simplified example, consider Corporation G and Corporation P. One will eventually lose market share to the other, go bankrupt, and be replaced by Corporation R that bases its business practices on the more successful one (then the cycle repeats).

Both are evil, as corporations are wont to be, and in particular will never release anything under a less restrictive licence than they have to (so they will never release software under a MIT licence). However, G will release software under the GPL if this allows it to save work, whereas P will always release software under a proprietary licence, even if this forces it to expend more resources rewriting GPL functionality.

Releasing code under the GPL exerts a selection effect that favors G over P, and in the long run results in corporations that release somewhat more software period - and significantly more software under FOSS licences - than if P was not forced to redo work.

That's basically the logic I used too for my own code. As I hinted at but may not have been made clear, I was using "exploitation" quite deliberately as a loaded term in the beginning, only to try to defuse it in my final paragraphs as in many, perhaps even the vast majority, of cases you aren't really being that "exploited" no matter what anybody does. If somebody outright stole any of my projects and claimed them as their own work, I still would honestly be only annoyed, and maybe make a few posts in my README.md about the situation, and move on with my life without even a thought about engaging the legal system or anything.

But as rare as it may be, there have been many cases where an open source code base really was "exploited" by any reasonable sense of the term, with corporations slapping their logos on it and reselling significant works in violation of the license, and those cases are significant because of their size, even if they are rare.

Is this meaningfully different from being able to build a multi-billion dollar company like Red Hat on top of other people’s GPLed work?

Yes, because of the GPL, they have to give RHEL customers the source to all their patches, but what difference does this make in practice?

> but what difference does this make in practice?

they have to give RHEL customers the source to all their patches, and allow them to share it with the entire world.

In practice, that means everyone gets better software, and RedHat gets compensation for their hard work.

> but what difference does this make in practice?

CentOS is the difference; it is one of the most widely used distributions has the same stability and longevity characteristics and gets security fixes just as fast as RHEL.

That is a good point. Perhaps a better example would be FAANG making billions and running their servers on Linux, which (IIRC) is what things like the AGPL are designed to prevent.

The AGPL wouldn't prevent FAANG making billions, just ensure they respect end-user freedom while doing so.