The (A)GPL aim is to retain the freedom of the user to view, modify, compile, and redistribute their changes. They explicitly limit the freedom of the developer to close their source would that the user has those freedoms.

To use an extreme example that I'm not using as an example for moral equivalence, but as a procedural one: laws against any (e.g. theft, murder, trespassing, &c) limit the abilities of one party for the benefit of another.

Licenses like the MIT and bsd license take the opposite approach: they give the developer the freedom to use the code as they want, including closing it from inspection and modification by the end user.

Both allow someone to be constrained in some way. It's just a matter of who.

> 2. Do they make it harder to sustain a living wage through the labor of writing software?

I mean, RedHat seems to be doing OK? The recent kerfuffle about mongo and elastic search seem to be because they chose more permissive license at the start, and not a copyleft.

So, who knows? Business is hard and no one factor makes or breaks your chances?

There's a clash between user's and developer's freedoms: if a developer is free to keep the source code private, then said software's users are not free to study, change it, and distribute those changes.

The free software movement prioritizes user's freedoms (the 4 essential freedoms [1]) over developer's freedoms. You seem to do the opposite.

> 2. Do they make it harder to sustain a living wage through the labor of writing software?

Your wording makes it hard to answer the question. If you get paid purely to write software, it doesn't matter if said software is free software or not. If you sell software copies/licenses to pay for your development, then it is objectively harder to earn as much.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

He does, though they arent copyleft.