It may be true, but the GPL is uniquely positioned to create a floor that ratchets upwards, whereas the other licenses are susceptible to being consumed and extended.
Often in practice people found that does not work with BSD/MIT-like licenses: you keep your changes and patches in-house and the original project moves forward. You then have to keep carrying forward your work, and you're either losing out on public fixes or have to expand energy to fix merge conflicts.
Lots of vendors learned this the hard way with (e.g.) FreeBSD: you want to follow the development branch (-HEAD) and merge early and merge often.
An exception to this would be one-shot forks, like Sony did with the PlayStations: you have your base functionality and it will never change for the life of the product so you don't really need future updates.
Is this ever an actual goal for most GPL projects? Usually the ones I talk to are not even interested in gaining more users.
The article makes a case that this will eventually push GPL out of the mainstream. No one will use GPL because they "have to" (which is the whole premise of copyleft!). It will only be used by enthusiasts
I have to admit I think a lot of people with this sort of "death to capitalism" mindset simply won't get anywhere, because they literally don't want to. I guess that means they may eventually fade into obscurity.
But the majority of project leaders I have talked to all seem to follow this mindset... they're not interested in making money, and "this is not a popularity contest."
Yet when a fork inevitably emerges, they go nuclear. Reminds me of a quote I saw one time... "they don't want open source, they want to be the ONLY source."
The article makes a point that permissively-licenced projects have the best survival characteristics, and that's why most (quality) software will eventually be permissively-licensed, while GPL will fade into obscurity and will be used only by enthusiasts why care about fairness more than they care about the actual quality of the software that they use.
Users care about convenience and familiarity, then perhaps (perceived) functionality. People who care more about quality are a niche, not only in the software industry. Prioritizing quality means higher cost in some way, even if it's just effort to research the best choice.
> Most people will use a proprietary project if it's better.
Most people don't even compare available choices. Usually they don't choose based on license, but based on popularity or familiarity, based on what's the standard in the industry or within their community. If a user's been running a tool for years and it's good enough for their purposes they have no reason to look for an alternative, and the license or whether it's "better" is irrelevant. And big tech platforms love to amplify this effect with dark patterns and various forms of lock-in.
The thesis is that "GPL code becomes irrelevant", and they are probably right about GCC. It doesn't mean GCC goes away, just that it will become irrelevant to more people. Sun Studio and Borland C++ are even more irrelevant, not sure where that fits in the conversation. Is MS Visual Studio becoming irrelevant?
While there's nothing wrong with purely enthusiast projects, they never got the amount of traction practical FOSS projects get. How many users does SerenityOS have, compared to Linux?
I invite people to ask themselves, do we really want a "pure hobbyist Linux OS"? How many modern feature are we willing to surrender for it?
Haha. I work on Solvespace which is technically inferior to FreeCAD, which is also inferior to the big commercial offerings. We shall have our MVP in a few more years! Most our contributors would not be working on it under an MIT license. I certainly would not.
Most users put functionality above the license, copyleft or not. Among two comparable projects one will always be more popular and I highly doubt the license is often a deciding factor for that.
> It implies that copyleft projects such as yours will be largely pushed out of the mainstream
Those CAD projects were never in the mainstream to begin with. And FreeCAD might have a niche target audience but for me it has no viable competitor. The situation got better in recent years but I don't see why I should make myself dependent on a subscription based commercial project that's incompatible with everything else including other products from the same company.
> Such permissive projects will always spead and develop faster, all other things being equal
Such as? Wouldn't one expect BSD systems to have overtaken Linux in the last three decades with that assumption?
In other words, it's a historical accident that there was no strong BSD alternative when Linux was picking up steam. Now it's too big to fail, and the GPL works in full force. GPL can't work in full force in the early stages of a project.