The intuition that helped me understand this was noticing that the GPL is trying to maximize societal freedom, and in contrast the BSD is trying to maximize individual freedom. So, is the GPL less free than BSD? Answer: For whom? Single individuals or everyone together?
An analogy: a society would have more individual liberty if dogs were allowed to poop on the sidewalk, because fining dog owners who don't clean up after their dog is reducing the individual liberty of those dog owners.
But the society with this individual liberty curtailed is a better society.
The same distinction holds across politics in general -- we might approximately map GPL vs. BSD onto, say, socialist vs. libertarian.
What about a society where individuals are free to let their dogs poop all over but most choose not to since it's unattractive and they've been raised in a society where personal responsibility is of paramount value?
This is the society I want to live in, and I think if you look at it pragmatically this is a society in which a lot of us already live (I have heard of very few cases where someone has actually been fined for not picking up their dog poop and I also see relatively little dog poop lying around).
It's the same cooperation problem regardless. GPL only works because enough people agree to respect the system that allows it to function. If no one payed lawyers to argue over licensing issues and no one supported courts in which to hear the arguments then the GPL would just be words on paper. Since we fundamentally live in a world where cooperation happens all the time I know that a utopian interpretation of this world is also possible. In fact, it's been my observation that people's willingness to cooperate increases as a function of societal excess, so if we are going to keep putting all our eggs in this maximize-production maximize-efficiency capitalist mindset that has taken hold in the last century it seems almost inevitable that natural cooperation will increase and we can rely less on codified regulations with the threat of force.
I don't think people are especially willing to cooperate in the absence of enforced rules, even with regard to the GPL. They didn't "choose" to live in countries where governments will perform force against them if they break the rules -- that's a very rosy view of consent and cooperation. And even in such a world, GPL violations are so common that for a while I think most Android phones in existence weren't even trying hard to pretend to comply with GPL.
Governments aren't strange 3rd party alien entities enforcing their "rules" on a captive population. All governments (and corporations) consist of individuals. Some day governments will consist entirely of people who haven't been born yet, so it seems a little disingenuous to imply these people are just being born into an authoritarian world that they have no power to change. Governments continue to enjoy legitimacy because populations choose to continue to accept them.
My argument was that these massive social structures are already the result of unprecedented levels of cooperation and their global influence and homogenization appear to be expanding. Are we at peak cooperation yet? Apparently not, some companies abuse the GPL and I still occasionally have to clean up other people's dog shit. And realistically there will probably always be a few "Mikes" somewhere polluting the lake for their personal profit, but I believe we are moving in the right direction and we will be able to reduce the freeloaders to a tolerable level as long as we continue to produce way more than we can possibly use. In the meantime I prefer to walk the walk, I'll continue to gift my extra time and energy to help others achieve their goals and I absolutely will spend an extra $50 on widgets if I find out Wanda is up to something shady.
I'm not against people who choose to use the GPL, I think it's an extremely clever legal hack, but I look forward to a world where people don't feel like they have to.
I agree with most of that. But like.. most software is proprietary, right? Left to their own devices, Microsoft and Apple didn't decide to cooperate with the world and share software; instead they became the richest companies in the world by instituting a de facto computer tax. What you describe as "cooperation" really seems more like "people complying with rules enforced by force to the smallest extent possible", even in this software example.
There are obviously some cases where humans work together really well -- times of conflict or disaster are probably a good example. But as society contains less scarcity, it seems like we move farther away from that massive cooperation, because there's no overriding need for it anymore.
The intuition that helped me understand this was noticing that the GPL is trying to maximize societal freedom, and in contrast the BSD is trying to maximize individual freedom. So, is the GPL less free than BSD? Answer: For whom? Single individuals or everyone together?
An analogy: a society would have more individual liberty if dogs were allowed to poop on the sidewalk, because fining dog owners who don't clean up after their dog is reducing the individual liberty of those dog owners.
But the society with this individual liberty curtailed is a better society.
The same distinction holds across politics in general -- we might approximately map GPL vs. BSD onto, say, socialist vs. libertarian.