> but if we just stick to facts, MIT-alike licenses provide more freedom for the final user. It depends what you think a user is. Is a user an end-user who has

> but if we just stick to facts, MIT-alike licenses provide more freedom for the final user. It depends what you think a user is. Is a user an end-user who has no intention of creating a proprietary fork? Or is it a developer who intends to create a proprietary fork? "If we just stick to the facts", copyleft provides equal freedom to both classes. Neither can create proprietary forks. For permissive licenses, the latter class is given an additional freedom (creation of proprietary forks), but the former class gains no practical freedom. However, what if the latter class gives the former class their proprietary fork? Then the former class has less freedom (and there is a history of this happening with Windows, OS X, and Android using BSD code without providing it to the end-user). This has always been the argument made by the GPL. Yes, proprietary software developers lose the freedom to reduce the freedom of other users. Instead it guarantees equal freedoms to all classes of users. I get it, you don't agree with the GPL. That's fine. But clearly the "user" being protected the GPL is the end-user. That was always the point (and that protection comes in a form that allows developers to have the same freedom and nothing extra).