The "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version"
    language in the GPL copying file is not - and has never been - part of the
    actual License itself. It's part of the _explanatory_ text that talks
    about how to apply the license to your program, and it says that _if_ you
    want to accept any later versions of the GPL, you can state so in your
    source code.
    The Linux kernel has never stated that in general. Some authors have
    chosen to use the suggested FSF boilerplate (including the "any later
    version" language), but the kernel in general never has.
    In other words: the _default_ license strategy is always just the
    particular version of the GPL that accompanies a project. If you want to
    license a program under _any_ later version of the GPL, you have to state
    so explicitly. Linux never did.

- For now the laws are in force, and I don't even know of discussions to change them (that EU proposal only wants to allow training on personal data)

- changing intellectual property rights law would typically require changing international treaties

- however much companies are in love with AI now, I'm not sure they'd support abolishing legal protections on which their business relies

I think in most cases twenty lines of identical code are more than enough for that to be the case (at least if it contains a few non-single-letter identifiers).

Because the chance of someone auditing the actual source code is near zero, but for open source software it's near 100% that someone or, worse something aka an AI bot looking for a revenue stream, will have a look at your code. And EVEN IF you get caught stealing by whatever random incident (say, your code repository being 0wned) - it's a matter of a settlement payment. If you are not a company, but an individual person... well, just look at what happened to Aaron Swartz RIP.

And for the WINE/ReactOS/console homebrew folks, it's vital to be able to claim no code contributor ever got exposed, even indirectly, to proprietary code.

As others said, for closed source software it's a lot harder to detect plagiarism.

And it's in general very hard to detect plagiarized code; there's some product that does it, but it of course has only a partial inventory of the existing open-source code.

I think that some big company does use those products, though.

Proprietary developers don't care because their code wasn't trained on. Is that a trick question?

They do care now that reverse engineering is possible.

I'm not sure that that's how legal departments think.

My post proved that copyfree code bases actually do receive contributions back from the commercial users of their code. Certainly not 100% of users, but the same is true for the GPL. Every company I've worked for after college has used Linux extensively and none of them have contributed back to Linux in either patches or dollars.

Why do you both keep incorrectly referring to the license as "MIT"? The BSDs are under the various BSD licenses, not the MIT license. If you're trying to refer to the whole category then I would suggest using the words "copyleft" for GPL-style licenses and "copyfree" for BSD-style licenses.

> If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.

I would like to direct you to the HN guidelines since this is a clear violation of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes it does. The assertion was:

> MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.

Therefore, any number of contributions disprove the assertion.