Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

yep. this times a hundred.

I keep saying that for a lot of people there's nothing they could do to change their opinion because people are so invested in them being a bad guy. It's part of a world view.

Yes.

I had considered doing the same thing, but I think pragmatically I'm never going to be able to build a "support" business around my libraries. Hell, I'm not even really interested in that type of business. I've spent most of my career as a consultant, i.e. mostly getting treated like a cost center, so it's not a difficult stretch to see that too much focus on the code as a product unto itself will lead to the same results.

My only chance of getting out of that is probably building my own products and partnering with a group of people who are good at marketing. I think, in large part, selling copies of software is a dead end business. There are some contrary examples, but I think they probably more prove the rule. Does anyone pay for Sublime Text for any reason other than "to support the developers" (i.e. not "because I need this software")? Video games have to be released on a regular schedule. Adobe has all the image processing patents. I think in all cases, people are buying something other than a literal copy of the software. So why not just sell that other thing directly and skip the noise?

On the other hand, assuming I end up making the libraries any good, someone else with a business of supporting software and the mercenary nature of refusing to help people with problems who don't have any money to pay, could probably snipe me in my own software.

So with that in mind, libraries I write always come out under the full GPL-3.0. Nobody deserves to close their use of my code. It has turned some people off (and I think that has more to do with their misunderstanding of what the GPL is practically about than any ostensible flaws in the GPL), but they can go start their own VR framework project for all I care.

How long do they have to pay for their past mistakes before they've done enough to placate people?

>if you are attempting to exploit other peoples code with out giving anything back to the people that created the code then GPL is a cancer

That's bullshit - GPL requires you to open source your derived work as well - which plenty of people have a problem with commercially - it doesn't mean you don't want to contribute anything (quoting you) back.

Even with the LGPL there are scenarios where sharing your code is not an option because of real world constraints (eg. NDAs), for example you need to modify the LGPL code to port to a closed platform. That doesn't mean you can't contribute back other improvements, but anything platform specific can't be released and therefore you can't comply with LGPL.

In general GPL creates a lot of problems to which GPL supporters just plug their ears and mantra "if you were truly free you wouldn't have those problems". Liberal licenses remove those problems and incentives to share back are there without the license requirement, you get your stuff maintained in the mainline and don't have to rebase on every update and reduce conflicts further down the development. LLVM is an excellent example of this where even traditionally closed companies OSS stuff because it's such a chore to keep up with latest. An example of a project being choked by GPL is Blender - a tool that has great potential to be a fully featured OSS 3D authoring package is struggling to fund developers because it can only sustain itself from government grants - nobody is interested in investing in it commercially because of the GPL. If it allowed for commercial plugins the OSS core would undoubtedly see significant contributions from those developers as well.