If I want to make a piece of software to improve people’s lives and I don’t care to do it for free, I’ll choose MIT. If it gets “stolen” by a for-profit corporation it only makes it better, because now my software has reached more people, thus (theoretically) improving their lives.
I’m not completely sure about this.
Suppose you write a library that a company like Facebook finds useful. Suppose that they incorporate it into their website. I’m sure I can skip the portion of this post where I extol the harms that Facebook has wrought on society. Do you think your software has improved people’s lives by enabling Facebook to do those sorts of things? They would not have been able to do them if you had used AGPL instead.
And I don’t want to make it seem like we should never do anything because someone might use the product of our work in a sinister way (because that would quickly devolve into nihilism). If 99 people use it for good and 1 for evil, that’s still a heavy net positive. But at the same time, I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that the 1 person using it for evil still would make me feel bad.