alt Hacker NewsI had many conversations about this and it always came down to business. GPL is indeed restrictive if your priority is the free market. Pretty much every serious BSD person I know of runs it as part of their business, so from their pov GPL is restrictive.
However in the context of the constant restrictions of general purpose computing, GPL has my back. BSD at best doesn't care about restrictive forks and at worst even welcomes them as 'good business'.
Two different approaches, they both have their place but as a user, I feel GPL was written for me. BSD (license) was written for the developer.
This is an oversimplification. I'm sure that some people think like you mention, but it is by no means all. I personally choose permissive licenses because I find the GPL to be hypocritical in the way it restricts freedom while talking about promoting freedom. If I'm giving a gift to the commons, then I want it to be a true gift, not something with strings attached. So for me, permissive licenses are the way to go. It hurts nobody if someone chooses to make a closed source fork - software is a non-rivalrous good, so whatever someone else does cannot take away the free version that I have provided. So I see no reason to deny others the freedom to use my software as they see fit, even if they use it in ways I don't personally agree with.