The only person I know of who considered GPL the last bastion of freedom (and who put all that stuff in the preamble) is Stallman, who we’ve already established is a horrible representative. That doesn’t make the license itself bad (well, not v2); it just means there is an additional level of crazy associated with that particular license. But it’s there, and it works decently.

I’m pretty sure RH and Novell folding would cause a larger shakeup than you imply (combined, they sponsor about 20% of kernel development; individually they’re still in the top five, ahead of IBM and Intel), but no, there likely wouldn’t much permanent damage to projects. This is true about BSD-licensed projects also.

Using your same example, if a BSD-licensed project packed up and left, many companies making money off it would also be relatively high and dry. That’s not exactly a symbiotic relationship either.

If you don’t like the GPL mentality, don’t write GPL code.

Of course. But there are reasons why I don’t like it. I don’t dislike things just because. This article serves to explain those reasons.

they won’t contribute if they feel they aren’t getting something good out of it

This is my point: choosing GPL over BSD for a software project means less software gets written, because less people will write it.
Of course, that may not be your goal (to get software written). You may want money, or accolades, or street cred, or whatever. In which case you use a license that (you believe) will get you those things. But then you don’t hold that license up as the last bastion of freedom, as ideologically pure, as the savior of software from all the world’s ills. And you certainly don’t put all that nonsense into its preamble.

Um… also, Novell and Red Hat employ developers who write quite a lot of fairly popular GPL code

Most open source projects wouldn’t even blink if RH or Novell went under tomorrow. Oh sure, everyone would blog about it, and maybe someone would have to go to the trouble of moving Mono to the SCM repo of the next corporate sponsor.
On the other hand, if the Linux kernel packed up and left, Novell and RH would be high and dry.
No part of that is a symbiotic relationship.

The GPL was Stallman’s way of providing a method of preserving the “share and share alike” programmer mentality of olden days before closed source became popular. It’s not as free as BSD, but that’s not the point. If someone wants their code to be useful to other people but doesn’t want someone else making money off it without contributing *something* back, that’s fine. If someone else doesn’t care, this is also fine. If you don’t like the GPL mentality, don’t write GPL code.

The GPL *is* selfish for the original developer. The contributors are selfish also; they won’t contribute if they feel they aren’t getting something good out of it. Much like capitalism, it usually works best when everyone is just looking out for themselves. Linus Torvalds has acknowledged this several times. http://lunduke.com/?p=725

Um… also, Novell and Red Hat employ developers who write quite a lot of fairly popular GPL code. Don’t underestimate the value they provide in terms of non-dev contributions either; Linux wasn’t always this easy to use. They’re also beneficial to the community in part because they provide legal cover for several projects if there’s a patent lawsuit.

You scratch your itches with shoddy toilets? That just *can’t* be sanitary…

First of all, the GPL isn’t “giving it away”, and although you addressed that pretty well, I think you ended up condemning it a bit more harshly than it deserves. The FSF seems to actively chafe against that reality, too, which is why allowing the SaaS “loophole” surprised me: it appears like someone in the FSF with veto power has a bit of business sense after all. Or their lawyers couldn’t figure out the right way to word it. Or something.

More importantly, though, is that part of the reason I use GPL for some projects is because that’s the payment *I* want for my initial work: I want to know that if you muck with it and you make something new out of it, I’m going to get to be able to see the source code to see how you did it. Or it’s because I’m doing something which I see as generally useful for humanity (like a programming language), and I don’t want someone privatizing and shrink-wrapping it and making it proprietary. And that “someone” that I’m stopping may well be a future-me.