Why buy something you can have for free?
That's completely false: anyone has the right to use it, for any purpose; that's what Freedom Zero is all about.
Some people do not want to both use it and also comply with its terms, but that is their choice; they can and may use it, but choose not to.
cannot resist to reply to nitpicks :-)
counterexample: let's imagine I'm an employee of a company which has a policy that forbids me from using any AGPL software for work and it also forbids to install said software on my corporate laptop at all (even if it was for personal evaluation or toy projects) or else, if caught, I might incur in disciplinary action, who knows, possibly termination.
I guess that in this case you'll agree with me that the statement "some people cannot use it" is not quite false and especially not completely false, in that , yes, I could use it (as in no physical law forbids me), and even if you might say that it's me who freely chooses to not use it in order to avoid the repercussions I don't really think I have a choice here, do I?
(I didn't downvote you)
Also: you shouldn't be using your company laptop for persona projects anyway... get your own laptop :/. So, likewise: "people who by premise are already doing something sketchy because they can't afford their own laptop and are pretending to borrow one under employment terms" is just an awkward place to start to define a reasonable, as opposed to pedantic, definition of "people".
Such a passionate developer however might find himself in a situation where she's not allowed to use some tool X because of a restriction put up by his employer.
That restriction might be a minor annoyance, e.g. raise the barrier to entry because "doh, I need to go and grab my personal laptop for that? nah, let me use something else". Or it might be a deal breaker: I need to get some job done, I'd like to play with tool Y, use it to get the job done and learn new thins while doing it.
This kind of people, those passionate developers, will complain about that.
They will complain to their employee for putting up such a restriction (and you'll usually not hear about those complains here).
But they will also complain about why the tool Y has chosen a license that his employer find so problematic.
These people will not just stop complaining just because they shouldn't be wanting to play with things in the first place. That's what they do, and that's often why they are good at doing things.
People do complain when they have too many rules that hinder their ability to do stuff effectively. I do see that happening, quite a lot; and I can understand why and relate to it.
Do they have the right to complain? Well, that's another story.
If the tool is closed source and they don't want to buy a license, then sure they can complain but they will just shrug it off as "that's the way it is" and move on.
I believe that things start to be more blurred when you have an open-source tool, which suddenly you cannot use (I'm not saying extend and sell commercially as closed source!) just because of FUD around licensing.
No, it means some people CHOOSE not to use it. There is nothing stopping them from deciding to use it, other than their own fears.
What the lawyers decide in a company that has 10k+ employees has nothing to do with the fears of anyone but the lawyers and the top management. Everyone else is just following the rules.
Working for one of those large companies, you simply don't have an option.
And the people without choices vastly outnumber the people who do have choices.
Frankly, most developers are probably happy using whatever code, under whatever license, that's available. It's the people who run the business who typically make the decisions about what's OK and what's not.
So it's developers who are punished by GPL, by and large, because many can't use the code. It's not helping those developers, and nothing zealots say or do will convince the legal department at those companies that they should change their position on (A)GPL.
Actually thinking of Amazon.com. They have competitors, sure. But they also have the budget to write their own entire stacks internally when the license doesn't fit. And it's not like their decision to avoid GPL software is hurting them in the market in any relevant way.
When something is MIT licensed, they'll use it, and they can and do contribute changes upstream. GPLv2 code requires serious hoop jumping to use, and GPLv3 software is verboten (the patent clause can't be adhered to by large companies with cross-licensing agreements: Many of these licensed patents can't be sublicensed, and so they can't be in compliance with the license at all).
So all GPL does is prevent companies from using and supporting the software. For every instance of an MIT project that ends up modified in proprietary code there are probably 100 that either use it verbatim or contribute changes back upstream. It just makes sense so that you don't need to keep maintaining an increasingly divergent fork.
And it would explain why say a gaming company can't have such rigid policies. Preventing that a game get delayed is worth both lawyer time and, in the case that a license directly conflict with the business model, send mail to the author and asking for an exception. For example, I recall that LGPLv3 which has the same patent clause you describe as "clause can't be adhered to by large companies" is used by blizzard in starcraft 2. Blizzard is not Google in size, but they are not exactly a street vendor. One might also ask if they have much need to protect patents about xml parsing, or fonts, or what ever specialized functions those numerous library do that blizzard use to build a game. The only thing they don't use is copyleft, as their core business model is designed around restricting copying in order to limit supply when selling copies.
Per case evaluation make sense when your product is time sensitive and when there is a lot of competition. A game from Blizzard is almost treated the same by the market as a game by a indie studio (keyword: almost), and a such can't rely on market share to protect them. A bad, delayed, and rushed game is still bad and won't sell regardless of who made it (To name an example, the last batman game). They must be agile, which mean religious thinking about software licenses must be thrown out and per-case evaluation be added to the process. If a library can be use within the business model, saves time and money, and is not your core ingredient in making your game stand out, its almost always a good idea to use it.
It's the Google/Amazon/IBM/Apple size where you end up with endemic cross-licensing patent agreements. That's where they can't adhere to it: They have a license to a thousand patents that protects them from being sued, but they don't have the right to sublicense those same patents. (L)GPLv3 requires they sublicense any patents they have to anyone who's sued, IIRC, so since they can't, they lose the ability to distribute their software.
I'd be somewhat surprised if Blizzard were a party to such an agreement. They might be party to a "patent-troll-don't-sue-me" agreement, I guess? No idea. But if they are, depending on the terms of their agreement, someone could potentially sue them over it based on LGPLv3 terms.
I'm not planning to, so I haven't done the research, to be sure. The risk scenario that comes to mind is a stretch, but say I buy a Blizzard game with LGPLv3 code in it, which grants me the right to be protected against patent lawsuits relevant to that code, and then I ship my own game that uses the same LGPLv3 code -- and I'm sued by a patent troll over a patent that Blizzard has licensed through some agreement. Guess what? I can now demand that Blizzard protect my use of the same LGPLv3 code by sublicensing me that patent. Which they (probably) don't have the right to do. So they either pay for my license or they have to stop distributing their LGPLv3 code.
For Amazon, who distribute tons of code for people to use in AWS, and the fact that they're a much larger, more collectable company, the scenario is proportionally worse.
It's all beside the point, though: In no case is it the line-level developer making the call, it's someone in management. Not everyone can (or even wants to) work for Blizzard or equivalent.
In particular, not everyone wants to work at literally half the compensation or less just so they can have full software freedom, whatever that means. The Google/Amazon/Apple compensation can be that much better than start-ups for top developers. I didn't realize this myself until I got a job at one of them.
And I'd love to be able to use RethinkDB where ever I end up next, without having to worry about whether the company legal department has a problem with (A|L)GPLv3. It's a battle I wouldn't even bother taking on in most cases; too much work when I could use something else and get back to doing real work.