I love open source and appreciate free software tenants, but think this is absolutely an argument against using the GPL for library-style codes.<p>Your point is an ancillary benefit.  Most authors don&#x27;t publish libraries to encourage the greater FSF-ecosystem or free software agenda -- they publish to make it available to others and see it get put to use.  Picking a license that limits prevalence of use is contrary to that objective, plain and simple.<p>It also does not necessarily follow that proprietary would have been the alternative to free software.  Published as ISC&#x2F;MIT&#x2F;BSD, lots of additional open source software would have been able to make use of the library, advanced more quickly, more easily permitted additional open source and free software derivatives, etc.<p>More power to authors that choose to use GPL on a library code, as they are certainly entitled to do so, but it is a substantially limiting factor in the near and long term.  We do not have to agree on these points. ;)