Controversial opinion: Copyleft is actually more free than permissive licenses.
Because the way the GPL works is how the world would be if there were no licenses and no copyright at all. Because then anything made public is free to use. And if I were to reverse-engineer a binary then I could still add that code to my software.
But since we live in a world where we play make-believe that you can make something public and still “own it” at the same time (e.g. copyright) and where using reverse-engineered code can still get you into legal trouble, the GPL is using their own silly logic against them (like fighting fire with fire) to create a bubble of software that acts like a world without any licenses.
Permissive licenses don’t do that, they allow your open software to just get repurposed under a non-free paradigm which could never occur in a world with no licenses. And so ironically permissive licensing in a world that is (artifically) non-permissive by default does not reflect a world with no licenses, and is thus less free than Copyleft.
This is actually more terrifying than you might have intended.
I’ve long thought that the greatest danger AI poses is going to be the “man behind the curtain” effect. If people can blame everything on AI then AI can be a blanket covering deliberate harm.
Imagine if government starts using AI for decision making. You could easily end up with a “man behind the curtain” who’s actually calling all the shots and just pretending it’s the AI doing it. Then you’d effectively have a dictatorship where nobody knows/believes they’re in a dictatorship.