This is splitting hairs. Of course there is no restriction on use, but in order to produce a derivative work I will want to eat my own dogfood. If my company's legal department says that our product must remain proprietary and closed-source, then it stands to reason I will not be able to build it on a GPL base. Those people will likely have to choose not to use GPL software, at least to some extent.

(If they have a good legal department that understands intellectual property issues at all, and their product team knows they don't actually need to hack on the Linux kernel to make whatever they're building, then they will not likely be restricted against using Linux ... but the decision will necessarily restrict their choices when finding other components to use as part of the system they are building.)

Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, I certainly feel is debatable and I'll reserve judgement. But it is provably wrong to say that nobody chooses not to use a GPL-licensed piece of software because of the license it is distributed under. Tons of people do.

No it's not splitting hairs. Using a piece of software and distributing a derivative of that piece of software are two completely different things. Nobody chooses not to use a piece of software because it's GPL. If people choose not to distribute derivatives under restrictive terms then that's great because that's exactly the reason I licensed it to them under the GPL.

You do what you want when you publish software! But if you take the entire class of people that produce derivative works, and count them as "not users" you are making a set error. Derivative works producers are also users.

GPL licensing will not stop me from using your software. It will stop some people. I do not say that I agree with those people and their decisions. I could not have built my career without GPL software, and it does not stop me.