> I've found that programmers tend to frame licenses in they way you have, placing emphasis on how the GPL affects them and describing the GPL as a way to enforce tit-for-tat but software is such an important part of everyone's life now that it's worth considering how licenses affect non-developers too.
That's the point people keep forgetting. GPL wasn't created to benefit developers, it was created to benefit end users.
My iPhone has a BSD-licenced kernel. Having that kernel under that licence benefits me as an end user of the product. Maybe having used another kernel would've resulted in a less stable mobile that would not have taken off.
> I doubt any licensing makes your phone more stable
Sure it does. Without open-source software to base their work on, Apple would have had to start from scratch and possibly never get the project into a usable state. (In fact, they did actually try several multiple times to replace Mac OS 9 with an in-house-developed OS, before eventually buying NeXT, whose OS was rebranded as OS X and ultimately became iOS).
That's the point people keep forgetting. GPL wasn't created to benefit developers, it was created to benefit end users.