The GPL is useful when you want to build a community of open source code, but not useful when you want to work for someone else for free. Arguably, that's the whole point.
I'm not sure if you were summarizing or disagreeing with me, but I mostly agree with you, except that I think the "work for someone else for free" part is spin. It's not totally inaccurate, it just mischaracterizes the goals and practicalities of the work. The goal isn't to make something useful to commercial entities, it's to make something useful to anybody (or, more likely in my case, nobody). Working for someone also implies that they control the design and direction of the work, but one of the huge draws of open source work is that you are able to design and direct it however you want. If someone likes your design and direction, they can use it, but they can't tell you what to do.
Sometimes it’s also about being able to reuse work that you’ve done elsewhere for other employers. My current employer is friendly to the idea of me open sourcing a lot of the ancillary work that I’ve done that may be useful to other projects.
Using the GNU GPL family of licenses would not even be on our radar. (It isn’t core code, and if we accepted contributions from elsewhere, it would then start to have the ability to taint our code.)
