(CC0) Mar 3 2025 - Chris DeBoy More sections will be added as I think of them.
Of the supporters of the GPL that I've encountered over the years, the overwhelming majority of them when justifying it claim that it protects your code from so-called "big-corpos", so they don't just "steal your code".
Actually, it doesn't, and if anything, counterintuitively does the opposite.
Your license is only as good as you are able to enforce it, meaning you have to be willing to take the offender to court and sue them, meaning you have to incur the cost of lawyers and court fees. Keep in mind "corporate" entities most likely have far more money than you can can not only hire much better and expensive lawyers than you, but they can tank the costs, whereas you likely can't. You could win the lawsuit and win up destitute.
Also, it's gonna be really hard to prove someone is in violation without first seeing their code. Take WinAmp, for example, which was in the past year open sourced, and it turns out they had been using quite a bit of GPL code for years as a closed-source project.
On top of this, code published under permissive licenses is going to be more beneficial to small upstarts, as they won't be forced to release any changes they make, allowing any competitive advantage they may have created to remain secret, at least for however long it takes for their innovation to be reverse-engineered, so they at least have a first-mover advantage.