"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.
> I don't think "being comfortable with being exploited" is a component of "being a big person".
In the context of the types of projects I was imagining, a company would likely just rewrite any code that wasn't available via MIT or similar. If I'm not getting anything in return either way, am I being exploited?
Logically, if the outcome is the same for me, 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.
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.