Free to whom? The freedom to use it in commercial software is restricted by the GPL. For this reason I consider the BSD/MIT licenses more free, for it says nothing except, go ahead use it, tinker with it, change it, republish it, whatever.

Maybe if I thought bicycling..., I think your analogy would work better if it was bicycling as a strategy to fight against the cars and freeways paradigm. The GPL is a legal tactic of the FSF movement, who believe that intellectual property in software is immoral - it's not just the promotion of more free software. Being that the software industry exists within a larger social framework where intellectual property is accepted, and we have many commercial entities doing it, I don't believe that producing more GPL software will result in reversing that move that Stallman was so upset about, that led to the FSF - that move from everyone freely sharing their software in the early days, to closing it up and selling it commercially. For your bicycling analogy, I think the BSD/MIT licenses work fine. Biking is fun, and so is making free software, but biking more as a tactic to end the automotive industry, once again, seems naive. I believe that if the FSF has a moral problem with intellectual property, a legitimate philosophical argument, then it should be addressed on a larger scale than simply in software.

The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses, is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use. - The BSD/MIT licenses are more free for the user, for they can now use it in commercial software, a right eliminated by GPL. This protection of rights argument comes from the mentioned viral strategy of the FSF as a strategy to --combat-- proprietary software, specifically by eliminating this freedom to use it in commercial software (an immoral use).

Trying to cause such a revolution from inside the software industry out doesn't seem plausible to me. Maybe I'm wrong - and maybe they'll win, but I don't think it's doing much -- so I continue to paste in the MIT license when I want to give away software, just so they know they can do whatever they want with it, and if someone wants to paste some of that into their commercial program, wonderful -- knowledge shared - which was my goal of giving it away: to contribute to the general understandings and capacities of software.