Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's your definition of "useful", not mine. "political aversion"? We are talking about money and business here. If a commercial company wants to ship a product without reinventing all the wheels, they are going to use code with permissive licenses, and skip projects with GPL license or similar in a heartbeat. You could even argue quite the contrary -- when you make your project GPL/AGPL etc, and if it is big/impact…
Apple literally offered the clang/LLVM copyright to the FSF to be released under the GPL. This was basically just ignored. https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html Furthermore there were real technical problems with gcc, certainly at the time. There were good reasons to start a new compiler project. The license was always more of a detail, rather than the main thing.
> The GPLv3 was the final straw that ended Apple's interest in contributing to GCC which is the reason Apple ended it at GCC 4.2.x.
I guess GPLv2 is still GPL, but here we end up talking about copyleft licenses (GPLv3) affecting business decisions anyway.