[ajross]

In practice, lots of initial authors choose licenses out of tribal affiliation and not simple logic or strategy. People who are inclined to distrust the FSF are likely to pick a permissive license even though the truth is they expect things that can only be guaranteed by a copyleft license.

Conversely the LGPL and family exists in some sense because the free software community tried to apply copyleft to project that can really only be successful with a permissive license.