Do not the small developers benefit from open source? Startups that are not making money, even? Personal projects, etc.
The difference between the food bank and this is that food cannot be consumed by everybody, all at once. It's near impossible to make "free" software that cannot be used by companies that are profitable. Who would police "profitability" when there's no money involved? The best you can hope for is to prevent a profitable company from using your code. Chances are, if the code is useful enough, someone else will write something similar without the same restriction.
My take: If you're writing FOSS, you know what you're getting into. If you need the money to do it, you should plan for that.
Does the GPL do enough to protect us from private extraction of the commons? I used to advocate for 0BSD but at this point it seems like we need something like the AGPL or Parity.[0]
I'm one of the contributors to the API Copyleft License. Are you using it for a public project? I'd like to feature that kind of work on https://apicopyleft.com.
Keep reading! That is just the Purpose section, which summarizes the license. The specific sections affecting copyleft are Copyleft, Prototypes, Applications, and Contributing. I think they are slightly easier to read and understanding on the master branch of the development repository: https://github.com/kemitchell/api-copyleft-license/blob/mast...
My gripe with copyleft was that it used copyright, which I wanted to avoid participating in. Unfortunately, this means that you're making it very easy for others to take your work, obfuscate it, and receive copyright protection for their "derivative".
My goal was to remove copyright from my work, but using permissive licenses seemed to instead mean "I'll give up my copyright protection, but you can take my work and receive copyright protection and sue others".
The difference between the food bank and this is that food cannot be consumed by everybody, all at once. It's near impossible to make "free" software that cannot be used by companies that are profitable. Who would police "profitability" when there's no money involved? The best you can hope for is to prevent a profitable company from using your code. Chances are, if the code is useful enough, someone else will write something similar without the same restriction.
My take: If you're writing FOSS, you know what you're getting into. If you need the money to do it, you should plan for that.