19 november 2019
I don't believe that Free Software (tm) has built up the good will and social capital that is often alleged by its advocates.
For non-technical end users, free software is equated with freeware aka "free as in beer". And surely, if you have no intent to read or modify the source code for an application, that's all that Free Software boils down to. Nobody but a small fringe are using Libre Office because of freedom, they're using it because they don't want to pay for MS Office.
For developers, there is definitely some good will and social capital towards permissive licenses like MIT and BSD. But I would argue that this does not extend to GPL. In fact, most developers outside of the FSF cult do not like working with GPL dependencies because they restrict their own freedoms to produce and distribute software. I certainly have no good will towards GPL, I avoid it whenever possible.