You are probably correct in this assessment; it's something I've thought about, as in "Why do so many developers hate the GPL, and prefer things like the MIT license and others?"

I think - I'm not sure - that developers have "forgotten" that they are users, too.

It's probably also an age-related thing. There's a large group of developers who don't remember - they weren't even born yet! - how software used to be in the 1970s and 80s. How everything was extremely proprietary - and costly to purchase. Heck, just a simple C compiler could set you back hundreds or thousands of dollars (and we're talking dollars back then - not today's).

They also don't know or remember times of a company going under, and taking the support of that proprietary software with them, and the mad (and expensive) scramble to find something else, depending on what the software was for. They never experienced Borland going under, as developers (or any number of other development tools companies for that matter - Lattice C, anyone?). Or the number of companies that supplied software to businesses going under, or being acquired (usually by CA or IBM - with varying levels of "continued support").

They forgot - or never understood - why Stallman created the FSF and the GPL in the first place. Recent events, and probably future ones unfortunately, will likely make them recall their history, hopefully.

Me, personally, as a developer, always liked the GPL. It isn't great for a business; it makes it difficult to sell such software, because you have to provide the source code - but from a developer perspective, I've always looked at it as the currency being paid as being the source code.

In other words, by using the GPL for my code, I'm saying "if you use my code, and develop something, and distribute it - I want to be paid". Other licenses, they don't have to do anything - not even a mention in some cases (outside of the BSD - which they can then easily bury elsewhere). But with the GPL - they do have to pay you, as the developer, something in return: They have to pay you with source code.

Source code won't feed you. It won't keep the lights on, or a roof over your head. However, as a software developer, being paid in source code is valuable. It means that (in theory) my code can be made more useful for others, that those additions and changes can live on, and that the product - in theory - won't go away if or when I go away, or the company I am a part of goes away. The code - and the product it is - will remain available. The legacy of it can remain. It won't be buried.

To me, that's valuable - in some ways, more so than cash. Maybe because source code is what we make; it's our legacy - the artifact and mark we leave behind. In a way, it's our art. We want it to continue to exist, for people to look at it and hopefully enjoy it, to know who created it.

With both licensing (and to an extent, DRM, which is related) getting in the way - it is possible to erase this legacy from the society.

To end this - I've found great pleasure in unearthing very old code from various places and "things" on the internet; most of the time, it's been a private endeavor, but at some point I want to get the code back out for general use (that is, I want the code to live on). In some cases, I've found this code in weird scanned research papers from the 1960s and 70s, dealing with strange subjects (for instance, I found some stuff on 3D programming in BASIC in a set of papers by someone at the USGS in the 1970s). Technically, the code isn't "open source" (I'm not sure what it is, since it was paid with tax dollars - probably not public domain, but I don't know) - but I think the author and their code should be recognized, as a contribution to the history of computing.