I don't understand your point. There are people taking advantage of both GPL and BSD. Some (not all) of the GPL violators can be made to comply, and none of the BSD "violators" can be made to comply, because they are not actual violators.
All of the previous statements do not alter at all that all the software pieces that are "taken advantage of" are huge value contributions to society at large and that their success is not dependent on the license choice.
If you are angered by "other people profiting with my free software" you will of course choose GPL to have an option to sue. If you don't care, you will choose BSD or GPL for another reason. Neither option will make much of a difference on the success of your project.
> There are people taking advantage of both GPL and BSD.
But whereas it is fine that they take advantage of the GPL, because they must publish their modifications and anything linking against it, with BSD they can make all the changes they want, link to whatever they want, and sell the result.
I get you are fine with that, but some of us aren't. Which is why we use copyleft licenses and try to explain out positions like this.
> are huge value contributions to society at large and that their success is not dependent on the license choice.
LLVM vs GCC - Apple effectively built the former ground up because the latter wouldn't budge on the GPL. There are a lot of parallels - be it busybox vs coreutils, or bionic vs glibc - where the license does matter, and what happens is businesses that are uncomfortable with providing freedom spend the effort (which is entirely in their right) to rebuild the whole thing under a different license.
The license does matter. And the GPL does help, because it means you either need to preserve your users freedoms or rewrite it yourself. It is a great motivator to drive the ideology if you can put great software in front of someone and say "all it takes is you behaving ethically, and you can avoid having to write this all by yourself". But the license really matters, it is why there is this conflict of interest in the first place and not everyone just uses the GPL without hesitation.
> But whereas it is fine that they take advantage of the GPL, because they must publish
As long as they comply. There are lots of people who don't comply and are sued where possible, which is not at all in all cases.
> LLVM vs GCC - Apple effectively built the former ground up because the latter wouldn't budge on the GPL.
And how is that better for the world, duplicating functionality and reinventing the wheel?
And what I've said twice (and now thrice) is that the license choice does not determine the SUCCESS of a project. People are a way more important factor.
As you said, you need that great software and awesome community, but you need it FIRST.
Yes, I'm aware of the monoculture argument. But anyway, the raison d'etre of the GPL is to preserve freedom, not to avoid monocultures, so, even if in this case we might be able to see a good outcome (even though that is still debatable as we have more than one compiler, gcc is big, but far from the only compiler) it's not actually relevant to the question posed in the general case, unless we think the only benefit of the GPL is to avoid monocultures...
I don't understand your point. There are people taking advantage of both GPL and BSD. Some (not all) of the GPL violators can be made to comply, and none of the BSD "violators" can be made to comply, because they are not actual violators.
All of the previous statements do not alter at all that all the software pieces that are "taken advantage of" are huge value contributions to society at large and that their success is not dependent on the license choice.
If you are angered by "other people profiting with my free software" you will of course choose GPL to have an option to sue. If you don't care, you will choose BSD or GPL for another reason. Neither option will make much of a difference on the success of your project.