I'm with Luke Smith [1] when it comes to non-copyleft licenses like MIT.
Andrew Tanenbaum of the MINIX fame was similarly surprised to find that Intel had quietly included the OS he wrote in Intel chips, making it perhaps the most widely used OS in the world. He seemed disappointed no one ever reached out to him to tell him about it [2]
[1]: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...
To intentionally mix metaphors, I can't believe I'm about to knowingly kick this well worn hornets nest.
It seems obvious that if Tanenbaum, or any open source project used a GP license in lieu of a permissive legally familiar license like MIT or BSD, the likelihood of the project being used in a commercial product would reduce to nearly zero. Intel would have used a different OS for their management engine.
I'm glad the GPL exists and believe the world is a better place because of it, but it feels like more and more it's salad days are in the past and the world has moved on.
The ops experience reminds me of the story of the maintainer of homebrew that despite widely being used at google was not able to be hired for a job there. It's disappointing and feels unjust, and I wish it was different.
"GPL or pay" could very well be an option as well.
Unless there was no MIT version.