I used to believe this somewhat, that MIT/BSD/CC0 were the “most free/open-source” licenses, because I was only looking at the license itself, not what the license would cause. The point of my article (in the first post) is to convince developers that this is not true, through several examples. BSD-like licenses are open licenses, but they do not promote the culture of openness. In other words, these licenses cause less software in the world to be free/open-source, compared to if GPL was used instead. The fact alone that the GPL is “viral”, “copyleft”, “poison”, or “infectious” is the whole point of the license since 1989.
GPL is the license that promotes the most openness, while MIT/BSD/CC0 promotes the most freeloading. Some developers think this is fine, so they should continue using them. If you want to use MIT for your projects, that is 100% fine with me, and fine with any audio software companies that need an audio format decoder or ZDF filter library in order to meet their $500k sales deadline this year. But some developers’ wishes are aligned closely with my wishes, and they might not yet realize that by using BSD-like licenses, it may spawn lots of proprietary software that isn’t open at all.
Licenses are a personal choice, so I’m not trying to sway developers to blindly use the GPL (this would be bad), but I want to make sure the license they choose is aligned with their vision for how their software should be used, so they don’t make a mistake like I did when choosing a license for Rack v0.3.