A common mistake in interpreting the GPL in my experience is that it is designed to protect the freedoms of the producer. It is explicitly designed to promote certain freedoms for the user. The producers set and the users set are likely to intersect, which is likely where some of the confusion comes from, but it is not common that they are identical sets.
If the corporate world is part of your target audience, then the GPL family, particularly AGPL and GPLv3 (though not so much so LGPL) are unlikely to be good choices. This is true whether you are a solo home developer, or a significant commercial entity, or something in between, yourself.
Just like commercial licences, and other F/OSS licences, the GPL takes away nothing. It grants rights subject to the grantee agreeing to its other conditions.
> under reasonable terms
That is a very subjective thing.
If commercial entities won't touch something of mine because I've chosen to license it under GPLv3/AGPL/else, that is only a problem for me if I care whether commercial entities use it. They are free to try negotiate a different licence. Of course I'm only able to do that for my contributions unless others the project has taken contributions from have legally stated on the record something to the contrary, but that is no different than for a commercial project which has multiple otherwise independent contributors.
As far as I know most fortune 500 companies would probably have similar reservations about these licenses (correct me if I'm wrong). Companies like TerminusDB switching license because "sufficient lawyers have advised teams to be wary of GPL" probably means that they were loosing lucrative deals with big customers because of the license. Hence the switch. I think dual licensing as a viable business strategy is pretty much dead at this point. An overly restrictive OSS license is a hard sell for a SAAS business in a competitive market with alternative solutions.
Legal interpretations are not an exact science of course but there's enough language in these licenses to cause raised eyebrows for lawyers and probably not enough court cases to argue one way or another definitely. That equals a lot of uncertainty and corporate legal departments hate that sort of thing. GPLv2 has had some exposure in courts over the years so lawyers are more comfortable with it at this point and know how to limit and contain its infamous viral nature.
I've also seen blanket bans on all GPL related licences in code (the dynamic in OS/app/other use differs, though way-back-when there was enough FUD/misinformation that there were blanket bans for those too) especially when GPLv2 was introduced (the "liberty or death" aspect was the cause of much consternation, I recall).
I don't think they are interpreting the license differently though for the most part. They are agreeing that is protects the user not the producer, and in giving those protects to the user it might be inconvenient for them (or even impossible for them legally, depending on licensing agreements and other restrictions they have to operate under regarding other parts of their codebase) as a producer.
> In other words, they weren't amateurs; like us.
At least some of the original impetus for the GPL was to protect amateurs like us from being used as free resource for parties that aren't. I'd say this is the system working.
> I think dual licensing as a viable business strategy is pretty much dead at this point
That is quite likely true, but only relevant in such a commercial context. If a developer doesn't care about commercial users of their code, for instance they are scratching an itch & want to share but aren't seeking worldwide adoption (and hold those "outlier opinions on freedom related topics"), then this is not a problem and GPLv3 is still a relevant option on its own.
Commercial viability is not the be all and end all of licensing decisions, if commercial gain and massive reach are not your concerns.
If a user wants to integrate my software into their commercial software, then they in turn pay me for their commercial use of my software.
If a user wants to integrate my software into their software to distribute it freely, then they don't pay me.
The only time a problem exists is when someone wants to integrate my software into their software for commercial purposes and doesn't want to pay me for it.
I also do the same myself. Internally within my company I use Linux and MySQL, both of which are GPL'd software and I am a very happy user of both software products and never felt like I was restricted in how I can use them.
If I wish to incorporate MySQL into commercial software, then I'd need to pay Oracle for a license, but I have no need to do that.
In what way is any of this incredibly restrictive?
At any rate, I don't know that we're going to change one another's minds on this issue, all I can say is that there seems to be a fairly substantial group of users who do not feel restricted in how they use very popular GPL software such as Ad Block, Wordpress, Git, Linux, MySQL.
I use all of those and never once felt like they restricted my usage.
Most freedoms constrain others. The freedoms that the FSF care about are the freedoms of the users. Not the freedoms of the developers, and not the freedoms of the corporations that make the devices that sell to users. If you want to recognise and protect the rights of end users, you will constrain other peoples rights to exploit them in various ways.
Which is to say that I think that GPLv3 (dual) licensed software does give genuine freedoms, even if they aren't the freedoms you are most interested in.
Your freedom to create a consultancy around the GPLv3 licensed code and to charge for customisations or support are all protected too. Again, I understand that that isn't the kind of business you wanted to build on top of the software, but it's still a real freedom.
I actually think a dual license might have been better in the case of terminusDB too.
https://github.com/search?q=license%3Agpl-3.0&type=Repositor... 1,419,692
https://github.com/search?q=license%3Aapache-2.0&type=Reposi... 1,500,312
gpl2 414,348 MIT 5,501,412
1) GPLv2: a legacy license still dominating e.g. Linux and other projects that simply never switched and leaves enough legal loop holes to not block commercial usage. Huge commercial success and arguably what bootstrapped the OSS world.
2) Apache 2.0. Huge commercial success and together with the MIT & BSD style licenses the no brainer go to license for anyone wanting to release some software under reasonable terms. These licenses dominate the vast majority of Github projects.
3) GPLv3 & AGPL v3. Only used by 1) people with outlier opinions on freedom related topics (trying to be diplomatic here). 2) companies looking to dual license their software under a highly restrictive commercial license or a highly restrictive OSS licenses. Technically free but limiting in practice in what you are actually allowed to do to the point where you probably need to worry about signing a proper deal for a proprietary license. Which is a different way of saying that it is not free at all You are not free to do what you want and you are certainly not free to build a business on top of the software; that requires a non free closed source license. The OSS limitations with respect to any form of commercial applications are kind of the whole point for the companies choosing this license: it practically leaves their users no other choice than their commercial license. Whatever your opinion on this, these licenses are considered problematic by most corporate legal departments and simply not widely used by companies with such departments for this reason.