In academia my impression is that the decline of the GPL is due to business models more than ideals. There was a period of popularity in the 1990s and 2000s where dual-licensing GPL/commercial was used as an attempt to both open-source the code while still making money from commercial users who would pay for a non-GPL license. The copyleftness in that strategy wasn't really about agreeing with RMS, but about making sure you'd get paid if the next version of Matlab shipped with your code in it. But only a handful of projects that've tried that have been successful at making any money from it (the Stanford Parser is one example that has been).

My anecdotal impression is that the trend is therefore towards picking either openness or money as the goal, instead of trying the dual strategy. If openness is the goal, you pick MIT/BSD, because they're simpler and you hope lots of people will pick up your code, and maybe you'll get paid in citations and PR. If money is the goal, go for a full commercial licensing strategy, and either don't release the code publicly at all, or release it with a research-use-only/no-commercial-use clause.

"The described trend is caused by consciously rejecting GPLs ideals,"

I very highly doubt that.

There are 3 cases I can think of:

1 - Business related models: "we're scared of GPL, we don't know what it is, but force devs to use smth else or code it from scratch"

2 - We're devs and due to 1, and possibly startups, we'll want non-GPL code. We'll also start to spam the community how GPL is bad in any possible way.

3 - All the devs are telling me GPL sux. I'm a cool and hip new person I'll do what they say to fit in. (I don't even care about what the GPL is made for).

Now, one could wonder, why'd they want to even use BSD or similar licenses? They could just go with public domain. THat's "real" freedom to their ears isn't it? Anyone does anything they want with it. Perfect.

Not so. They use BSD for credits. BSD forces you to retain copyright in the code, and that means if your name is in the code, you're getting a job very, very easily.

So you see, all the above only tells me one thing: People who know are misleading others (like you just did) on purpose for financial reasons, not because GPL ideals are wrong.

It would be OK if they at least mentioned the reasons in these simple terms. But that wouldn't help them achieve their goals, if others keep on using the GPL.

Shame on them, shame on you.

I don't think that most people understand the GPL. Everybody understands the basic spirit of it, but there are lots of details spread throughout that huge document. The preamble is longer than many permissive licenses. .That there is a preamble at all speaks to the complexity. It's too much for a small group or individual without access to a lawyer, and I don't think people in these cases are going to use a license that they don't fully understand.