> Exactly. The MIT/BSD/Apache 2.0 licenses are about trust and cooperation, not force. I see it rather the opposite. With the GPL, you make a piece of software

> Exactly. The MIT/BSD/Apache 2.0 licenses are about trust and cooperation, not force. I see it rather the opposite. With the GPL, you make a piece of software free precisely because you trust anyone downstream, in perpetuity, whether you've met them or not, to make modifications (or not) to the code, to forked versions of the code, to branches of forked version of the code, whatever. The assumption is that each person can decide for themselves whether the software should be modified, and if so, in which ways. They can check with you or with someone else if they'd like, but they don't have to check with anyone before making modifications. Companies that insist on MIT/BSD seem to be at least contemplating the idea that they don't trust downstream users, and don't want them to be allowed to further modify the software that was originally open source, at least not without separate permission. Hence they appreciate that the MIT/BSD licenses reserve them the right to use copyright law to keep downstream users from making modifications.