This is terrible work from whoever's made this page. Many important advances have taken place due to software being licensed under the GPL. For example, Object

This is terrible work from whoever's made this page. Many important advances have taken place due to software being licensed under the GPL. For example, Objective C wouldn't be supported by GCC unless Steve Jobs hadn't been forced to license the Objective C frontend under the GPL. c.f. Apple not making the source to the Swift compiler available, since LLVM is more permissively licensed. Now it is very difficult for people to create extensions, or submit bug fixes etc to Swift. There's a case of a Lisp compiler being made open source simply because the developer wanted to use readline. Licensing your software under the GPL can precipitate more software being licensed under the GPL. It leads to improvements and bugfixes being made public, and ensures that the developer can receive something back from those who use the software. On the other hand, it's clearly not for everyone. If you as a developer wish to see your code being used on as many computers as possible, then you'll be cutting off some of your potential market by licensing your non-standalone tool as GPL. The odd thing is that this site seems to suggest a false dichotomy of GPL vs permissive. It's perfectly possible to (say) dual license software as GPL or commercial - any company that sees value from your software could have the choice of paying $100 for a license. If your software holds enough value to them that it saves them a day or two of their developer time, then everyone comes out on top.