this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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It definitely stops anyone who is at least a little bit serious about what they're doing.
I don't think any license stopped Microsoft from training Copilot on any public Github Repo. And people usually don't bother with licenses if they just want to copy a few lines of code. I doubt my whole projects are going to be of much interest to the public anyway
It's not so bad if companies don't use your project. Normal people won't care.
Other FOSS projects can't use it, either. The only other "normal people" would be, like, tiny private projects and bad actors. Maybe clueless students, but my university project classes required us to appropriately follow licenses when using other people's code, or we'd get marked down.
The ability for FOSS projects to use your code is the best part about the FOSS movement. They can generally all copy from each other to improve efficiency, especially since many FOSS licenses are compatible with each other.
If you want to stop corporations from using your project, use a license that does that. Most typically, the GPL will do that (while still allowing some FOSS projects to use the code). It doesn't prohibit commercial usage, but for the vast majority of projects, the license is basically a poison pill and thus no closed source project will generally use GPL licensed code. But I personally strongly recommend against the GPL, as it goes too far. Most FOSS projects can't use GPL code themselves. It's a rather extreme license.
If you don't care, just use something like the MIT, Apache, or BSD three clause licenses, which are all super simple licenses that have broad compatibility. Doesn't really matter which you use. I kinda like the BSD three clause because I like the "no using us to promote yourself" clause.