I think that adding a (permissive) license is the missing step from this "tutorial". If you want people to use your project you are going to need to give them permission to do so.
You have to have a license to attract contributors. https://choosealicense.com/ and github make it easy; there's zero excuse to not have a license.
Permissive licenses attract the broadest range of contributors, so if you're looking to build a large community, they are the way to go. GPL tends to have a smaller overall, but very strong pool of contributors, so if copyleft makes sense for your technology, by all means use it.
The chance of a personal project building a large community are quite slim regardless of the license.
Chances are a personal OSS project will only attracts a few dozen users and maybe a handful of contributors (contributing mostly small bug fixes) with the creator as the only real developer/maintainer.
There is also a good chance that the maintainer will only contribute from time to time after the initial "dev sprint", if it doesn't abandon the project all together.
Basically the bus factor for such projects is 0. If you are relying on one of them, you should be aware that you may have to maintain a fork on your own in the future.
Given this state of things, I prefer having permissive licenses (ex: MIT) on my projects. It's a way for me to give complete freedom about what you do/want to do with my piece of code (piece of code that I may have abandon but is still useful to you). You can fork it and keep the fork OSS or you can include it inside the source tree of your product and maintain it that way, the later being generally easier.
Unless you don't mind a hostile take-over don't make it too permissive though. GPL is a good license if you want good protection while still allowing people to fork, share and profit on your work.
Are there any stories/examples of MIT-licensed projects being subject to hostile take-overs?
Also if it's you are the originator of a project what's stopping you from using the GPL license but not disclosing your own source while you commercialize?
Or companies adding closed source features to open source software. You can't do that with GPL unless you own all the code.
The classic business plan for software is to charge per license/copy. But if you release your software for free, you have to sell something else. And anyone who come up with a good solution for this will be the next unicorn.
Thumbs up on licensing. This is key to the success of a project in my opinion. If a project is missing a license, that's a clear sign that I can't use it. I've even filed issues on open source projects stating that I want to help them, but I can't due to unclear licensing.
I agree that it's crucial to have a good license for your project to spread. But I think it's one of those things that takes a lot of mental effort when you do it the first time.
Fortunately GitHub helps you quite a lot nowadays with choosing the license for your project.
The GPL advocates say it is FUD, but as any BSD advocate will tell you the concerns are real. Note that GPL advocates spread FUD about the BSD license
In my experience the GPL advocates completely ignore the concerns of the BSD people. The BSD people understand the GPL concerns they either don't think they are very real world (they will acknowledge some exceptions when forced to); or more pragmatically think that the GPL: concerns are outweighed by other concerns.
You need to figure out where you stand. Calling the concerns of the other side FUD is in fact not helpful.
Permissive licenses attract the broadest range of contributors, so if you're looking to build a large community, they are the way to go. GPL tends to have a smaller overall, but very strong pool of contributors, so if copyleft makes sense for your technology, by all means use it.
Just use a license, please.