Yeah, it strikes me a bit like, this will be hyperbole, complaining about forbidding slavery reduces freedom because you are not allowed to have slaves.
The difference is that nobody is harmed in the scenario where someone makes a closed source product with permissively licensed code. The original project is still there and still just as usable. Everyone still has the same freedoms as they did previously.
> The difference is that nobody is harmed in the scenario where someone makes a closed source product with permissively licensed code.
This is not true. What is harmed (and has effectively been destroyed) is the market to make money from selling libraries.
Many might be too young to remember, but it used to be that one could make a nice living selling libraries to companies.
In 1990 (just to pick a year) when BigCo Inc was developing a software project and needed library foo, they generally had two choices: build it internally or purchase one for money from a third party. This meant there was a nice market for small software houses to sell all kinds of libraries to BigCo.
Imagine for a moment a world where all open source is GPL. BigCo wouldn't touch the GPL libraries so they still either build or buy and we (developers) can continue to make money from our work.
Unfortunately it is no longer possible to make money from libraries because anything BigCo wants can be had for free in a BSD/MIT license so they get to take all the volunteer work, profit from it and give nothing back.
Yes, if you jeep your code closes then society is losing because everyone relies on you for everything. It's not about being usable, it's about being in control.
If that "someone" is backed by a large corporation whose goal is to extinguish the utility of the existing project, they might hire away some of the contributors and add features at a pace that the original project just can't keep up with.
While that's certainly capitalism at its finest, I don't think that's a good outcome for the user base as a whole, or of the community.
