I don't think people hate the GPL per se.
It's more about the way GPL is promoted ... in the name of freedom and all that shit, when in reality GPL is more likely to be used in instances where the company wants to sell commercial licenses.
What I don't like about the GPL is that it limits the choice of license for derived works ... where "derived" has a very broad meaning (if your software uses a GPL component, and that GPL component has no replacement, no matter how trivial it would be to implement one, than it's a derived work).
This is in contrast to .NET for example, which is proprietary and doesn't permit changes to the code base and it's not developed in the open ... but it doesn't restrict your choice of license.
Another bad example ... Qt's licensing may have been good for Trolltech, but because of that Gnome / GTK+ happened. As a result there are more third party applications (both proprietary and open-source) written on top of GTK+ / Gnome, although it is an inferior technological choice. Qt got LGPL'ed (finally) but I think it's too little, too late (regarding the Linux desktop).
The GPL (not talking about LGPL) is a good license if used for the right purpose. But it is promoted as being the backbone of software freedom, and looking unbiased at its current usage, that's just not true.
What I don't like about the GPL is that it limits the choice of license for derived works ... where "derived" has a very broad meaning (if your software uses a GPL component, and that GPL component has no replacement, no matter how trivial it would be to implement one, than it's a derived work).
This is in contrast to .NET for example, which is proprietary and doesn't permit changes to the code base and it's not developed in the open ... but it doesn't restrict your choice of license.
Another bad example ... Qt's licensing may have been good for Trolltech, but because of that Gnome / GTK+ happened. As a result there are more third party applications (both proprietary and open-source) written on top of GTK+ / Gnome, although it is an inferior technological choice. Qt got LGPL'ed (finally) but I think it's too little, too late (regarding the Linux desktop).
The GPL (not talking about LGPL) is a good license if used for the right purpose. But it is promoted as being the backbone of software freedom, and looking unbiased at its current usage, that's just not true.