[tptacek]

GPL is moderately less free than BSD/MIT.

GPL is significantly more free than closed-source commercial.

Two groups of people are negatively impacted by the GPL.

First, people who want to ship closed-source versions of code they didn't write in exchange for money, against the will of the package author. Hard to feel sorry for these people.

Second, people with BSD/MIT/Apache licensed open source project who want to make it possible for other people to ship closed-source versions of their code for money. A valid concern, but a pragmatic one, not an ideological one. BSD gives away "too much"; GPL holds back "too much". There's no happy medium.

Let's take the ideological cast off this ("freedom", "commercial", "semantic games"). The issue here is simple and practical.