If a software author wants for people to use/distribute his software under a specific license, that's his prerogative.
We're discussing the merits of particular licenses, particularly their impact on the software world, so this is kind of tautological, don't you think?
In any case, I was not aware of that difference between Apache and BSD, so you have my sincere thanks for pointing that out. I've got a few things on Github to modify methinks...
Well, I wanted to point out that as far as open-source goes, it has a pretty good definition and in the larger scheme of things, the actual open-source license used does not matter, all that matters is to get people to contribute.
But people contribute when they've got reasons to do so and many people believe in copyleft. And the GPL is an interesting case, because it happened because its author hated copyright, so he decided to turn it on its head and use it to his advantage. And in a world in which copyright (and other IP laws) keep getting worse, copyleft gets even more relevant.
To the issue of whether copyleft did any good versus MIT/BSD, well, would have Apple open-sourced WebKit if it wasn't for KHTML's LGPL license? I'm inclined towards no, but truth is, we'll never know.
On GCC on the other hand, its authors not only used GPL, but actually made it hard in the actual code for proprietary extensions to happen. This might have been good 15-20 years ago, when the landscape was dominated by proprietary compilers, but now I consider that we're better off with LLVM taking off.
We're discussing the merits of particular licenses, particularly their impact on the software world, so this is kind of tautological, don't you think?
In any case, I was not aware of that difference between Apache and BSD, so you have my sincere thanks for pointing that out. I've got a few things on Github to modify methinks...