[spacelizard]

>The GPL licence just causes more pain and frustration to developers.

I don't think this is true. It's not particularly hard for developers to comply with it, especially those who are used to operating in an environment where most software is proprietary. This is the world where corporate licenses and contracts end up regularly end up into triple-digit page lengths. It's where the answer from management to the question "can we use this third party software?" usually defaults to no regardless of the license. So as long as there is this kind of restrictive proprietary licensing, I believe there will be a need for copyleft to counterbalance it. Sometimes there is a real risk of a rogue organization trying to take free (libre) code in order to crush the community with it.

The fact that there is so much software out there that uses non-copyleft free software licenses I think is testament to how many, many of our techniques and algorithms have become trivial and commonplace. This is good that friction is being removed in these cases, no matter what license the downstream developers are planning on using. It's the sign of a mature industry.