Thank you for the sanity check. It is difficult for me to articulate really, but I guess I (perhaps in error?) have deferred battles over say proprietary drivers away from programming language licensing (just so that there is no confusion here, I am fairly hard line in terms of the usage of proprietary software for my own personal use; only falling marginally short of the FSF party line). Perhaps seeing this has me fearing that the project’s goals are more ideological than technical (or at least that a core of the community sees it that way?), while I (perhaps naively?) have a more laissez-faire approach believing that superior software is the way to software freedom and that legal “trickery” is a Faustian bargain in the end. I guess the feeling that arises in akin to when I see GNU projects banning even the mention of proprietary software from their communication channels. It has little effect on my excitement and respect for the software itself, but it comes across (to me) as somewhat misguided zealotry.

Sorry for the mess in terms of my writing. It has been months since I first saw the licensing and I still do not know how to internalise it properly.

I think copyleft is a good way of protecting a creator's intentions. While it's true that 'superior software is the way to software freedom', it's also true that free software is the way to software freedom.

If free software begets other free software simply through its replication, then I think the juice is worth the squeeze