It’s 100% this. Politics is treated like a sport in the USA; the only thing that matters is your side winning, and which side you root for is largely dictated by location and family history. This is encouraged by the private news media, who intentionally report on election campaigns in this manner in order to increase ratings and ad revenue. Social media only made it worse because it made a lot of abstract identity dimensions, such as political affiliation, feel stronger to people than their everyday lives.

I’m not saying that a private approach to this is better–I specifically noted that governments could potentially do the same thing, but in the public interest, and I’d prefer that.

Unfortunately, that “real estate play” that you’re complaining about is the oldest and perhaps the only way to build a public transportation network that isn’t a net loss financially for the owner/operator. In many Asian nations with great public transportation systems, such as Singapore, the majority of housing is public and so the government is effectively using the same play. Part of the reason good systems are so difficult to get past the conceptual stages here in the US is that transportation and land use planning functions are separated administratively with responsibilities housed in totality different agecies at different levels of government, so the parties involved are forces to at best “coordinate” and at worst basically guess what the other will actually do or build, which makes it almost impossible to put together the kind of land use pattern that supports public transport with good ridership potential.

The problem is, that would limit my own option to make a version of the software and sell it under a more limited license in the future. Whomever I sell it to then has the right to go ahead and redistribute it, competing with me. Sure, my current, highly niche code already carries that risk, but the MIT license doesn’t stop me from releasing a modified version I may write that is more valuable as software, and then protecting that release with other licensing terms.

I am a consultant who sometimes writes code to do certain useful things as part of larger systems (parts of which may be commercial or GPL) but my clients always try to impose terms in their contracts with me which say that anything I develop immediately becomes theirs, which limits my ability to use it in my next project. I can to some extent circumvent this if I find a way to publish the work, or some essential part of it, under an MIT license. I’m never going to make money off of my code directly; at best it’s middleware, and my competitors don’t use the same stack, so I’m not giving them any real advantage… I don’t see how I’m sabotaging myself in this situation; if anything the MIT license is a way of securing my freedom and it benefits my future customers as well since I don’t have to rebuild from scratch every time.