It's worth noticing some subtly in this. Those companies tend to be OK with the GPLv2 but not the GPLv3. A question to ask and that'll help understand all of this is... why do big corp lawyers not like GPLv3 when they were fine with GPLv2?

It's not an issue of copyleft.

Note, IANAL. I've just talked with several about licenses.

As shown in the article with the excerpt from Google's policy, I think you'll find the FAANG-type policies are all similar... any GPL* requires specific approval from legal, whereas the common liberal licenses have simplified approval.

The GPL2 linux kernel may be treated as an exception and allowed, but it doesn't mean GPL2 anything else won't be treated like leprosy.

IDK about all the FAANGs, but at least when I worked at Microsoft this wasn't true: GPLv2 had the same auto-approve policy as MIT/BSD licenses, whereas GPLv3 was forbidden without specific dispensation from legal.

One word: patents. GPLv3 has wording which suggests that you need to give up rights to patents when you contribute. If you're a large company, with a large patent portfolio, this becomes an expensive endeavor. Either you give up patents (which might have value), or you do an exhaustive search to verify that no patents are being infringed.

Apache 2.0 has similar patent language as GPLv3, and is the current bigcorp favourite open source license, so I'm not sure that's correct. Or am I missing something?

This is true, however I think that the perceived "viral" nature of the GPL gives the impression that patent invalidation can easily spread around to proprietary projects as well.

IANAL, but the GPL2 allows bundling and "tivoization" [0] with proprietary code, whereas the GPLv3 tries to prevent it. So, with v2, you can ship your proprietary application with an unmodified GPL'd tool along with it, but with v3 you can't. For v2, the copyleft applies to modifications of the tool, for v3 the fear is that the copyleft applies to all the software that touches the tool.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization#GNU_GPLv3

> This reflects the trend that large, rich companies will sideline GPL projects in favour of liberally-licensed ones, or create their own.

If they never intended to contribute then nothing is lost. It’s not a popularity contest.