MIT, BSD, Apache, anything that is open source but allows you to make the code proprietary.
> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
Permissive licenses are "free" in the sense that they allow to distribute free software (e.g. I can distribute a binary together with its sources even if they are MIT-licensed, and that would be free), but they also allow to distribute non-free software (e.g. I can take MIT code and distribute a proprietary binary).
Copyleft licenses enforce the freedom downstream.
I guess my original point is that I don't understand why people don't like copyleft, because copyleft enforces free binaries.
Yes, that sounds right to me. “Free Software” and “open source” are synonyms, with the FSF preferring to use one term over the other, despite recognizing they’re synonyms, because they are ideologues who are obsessed with language use. Permissive and copyleft are two different types of free software/open source licenses, with the FSF preferring copyleft.
To answer your underlying question: I like permissive licenses because I am not ideologically opposed to unfree software, and I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.
> I like permissive licenses because I am not ideologically opposed to unfree software, and I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.
My opinion differs here. First, the free philosophy is nice for me as a user: for instance say I buy a Marshall "smart" speaker, for which the software kind of sucks and is essentially not maintained (but still it connects to the internet...). I don't see how it would hurt Marshall to enable an open source ROM. After all, they sell the hardware, right? And a big part of the software running on that speaker is open source; they did not pay anything for it, and more often than not, they "forget" attribution for permissive code.
But companies try to minimize their costs, and contributing a bugfix back upstream is seen as a cost (conveniently ignoring that they did not pay for the software in the first place). With a copyleft license, of course the company can keep ignoring the license (like they do for attribution in permissive licenses), but at least it gives the developer an argument for contributing back upstream.
And it doesn't have to be GPL. LGPL and MPL are easy to handle.
> I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.
If the software has value, I am convinced that they can deal with copyleft (see Linux). And if the majority of open source software was copyleft, then companies would be used to it. Copyleft is really not that bad, it is just perceived as a source of cost by companies.
> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....