[throw0101a]

> RMS and his ilk developed these licenses pretty much because they wanted free shit out there with no stipulations.

Copyleft, having to release code diffs, is a stipulation / restriction.

MIT/BSD is the one without any stipulations / restrictions:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License

Depending on one's goals one may be better than the other.

[kekumu]

For anyone not very familiar with copyleft, the actual goal is:

> My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. [1]

Free as in freedom for the users of the software to control, audit, and modify what runs on their hardware.

The stipulations are there to prevent people who aren't aligned with those goals from benefiting from (and working against) the work done by the community that believes in those goals.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

[throw0101a]

Being forced to release source code is a restriction. Some people are okay with that, and others want totally unrestricted code available.

[morelisp]

> others want totally unrestricted code available.

It's easy to give the lie to this, because the restriction they are unhappy with is the restriction against restricting others. Anyone complaining about that is just masking a demand of "free for me, but not for thee" - definitely _not_ "totally unrestricted."

[zxzax]

Just a small correction -- The GPL does not require you to release code diffs. The requirement is that people who receive binaries from you are entitled to receive the source to that binary upon request.