the suits or suit minded people have realised that HN is good for advertising to the kind of demographic that'll give them free labour and is easily swayed by whatever the latest trend is
I think permissive licenses are fine in some cases (particularly if you're trying to standardise something. X11, LLVM, and BSD are good examples), but generally at least weak (LGPL or MPL) copyleft are preferred.
I'm still torn on what kind of license is best for operating systems, though (the GPL has forced companies to actually contribute to Linux but they also try and get around it in so many ways I have to wonder if a weaker license would be better)
In some cases, yes. It has to be used judiciously. The free software pioneers understood this, and wrote a little essay about it (LGPL vs GPL): https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html In short, it depends on the market situation: if you created something new and exciting, you should use GPL (nowadays that would be AGPL) to encourage lock-in. If you created something that is supposed to displace an existing proprietary product, you should use LGPL to encourage switching. These days it'd be MIT, but MIT is exactly the same as proprietary as far as user freedom is concerned.
People still see HN as a valuable place for promoting their businesses. Usually some poorly thought out SaaS.
If you look at what people outside HN talk about HN, it's not uncommon to see wannabe tech entrepreneurs talking about how to promote their products via Show HNs and how to stay HN front page. It's honestly a little sad considering that HN has a tendency to rip these projects apart.
People (and bots) who think HN is the place to “promote their products” don't understand HN (though, as you note, that belief is is widespread and is having an acute effect on our inbox!)
Show HN is for showing a cool project you've built. To warrant front page placement, it has to “gratify intellectual curiosity”, just like everything else. There needs to be some kind of novel breakthrough or something for others to learn from. Or, sure, some way it can help others with their work or life.
And yes, a byproduct of all this may be that some people buy a license or subscription. But submitters who are just trying to get attention and sales for a commercial product don't belong in Show HN.
> HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human.
HN's guidelines aren't that strict and the mod hammer is a plushie. It's not difficult to get by here. It's also kind of useful for critical reflection/self-regulation to hear the occasional "you came in too hot" or "don't be boring" from a moderator.
Seems better to me to just try to be sort of reasonable and let the mods nudge you if they need to and let your comments be downvoted from time to time. What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives? To never write an unpopular comment?