> For each of these projects that herald the BSD license as a feature, I ask myself - what's wrong with GPL?
Using the GPL restricts licensees more in the ideological interest of the licensor. If, as a licensor, I'm not interested in restricting licensees to serve my ideological interests (or if my ideological interests don't align with those in the GPL), why would I use it?
> In fact, if it wasn't for GNU and GPL, the world would be a very different place than it is now. I would claim that there would be no such abundance of free software that we find today.
So? That GNU and the GPL were influential in spreading the idea of FOSS, and even that there might have been a time when the GPLs restrictions were necessary to establish critical mindshare for FOSS, does not mean that the GPL -- whether the same version that existed then or the current version, or anything in between -- is the right license for any particular project now.
This confirms my suspicion that GPL does not cater to proprietary products and that the root issue comes from ideology.
Is it possible that GNU ideology was necessary just for booting? Can we bootstrap from GPL into something that does not care as much about the user's freedoms?
> Can we bootstrap from GPL into something that does not care as much about the user's freedoms?
IF by "does not care as much about the user's freedoms" you mean "imposes fewer ideologically-based requirements on those using licensed software", then we already largely have -- while the GPL and its relatives (LGPL, AGPL, etc.) are still around -- there are lots of major FOSS projects with active communities around non-GPL, more permissively-licensed software. (And even many projects that use the GPL -- such as Perl and Linux -- advertise a less-restrictive interpretation of its terms than the FSF states.)
I think the trend in the FOSS community in general is to prefer to less restrictive terms, which is exactly the opposite of the FSF's direction.
GPL was designed to create a legal protection against people who want to take software offered for free and then go and sue their users if the user dare to modify or share the newer version of the program.
There is little chance that GPL can be made into anything that would allow such behavior. I for once would ask what the point would be. If you do not want that legal protection, then you don't have to. There is no helmet law for software developers.
Using the GPL restricts licensees more in the ideological interest of the licensor. If, as a licensor, I'm not interested in restricting licensees to serve my ideological interests (or if my ideological interests don't align with those in the GPL), why would I use it?
> In fact, if it wasn't for GNU and GPL, the world would be a very different place than it is now. I would claim that there would be no such abundance of free software that we find today.
So? That GNU and the GPL were influential in spreading the idea of FOSS, and even that there might have been a time when the GPLs restrictions were necessary to establish critical mindshare for FOSS, does not mean that the GPL -- whether the same version that existed then or the current version, or anything in between -- is the right license for any particular project now.
> So why do some people route around GPL?
Because it doesn't do what those people want.