GPL Vs. Free Software Foundation

After my post about the GPL’s day in court in France, a programmer friend noted he no longer used the GPL for anything, now that its instigator, the Free Software Foundation, has (in his view) gone off a cliff. Do other people see the GPL as tainted because of the FSF’s rather stentorian views?

A lot of my friend’s unease with the GPL and the FSF has been building on and off for a while. A recent spate of events — including the FSF’s branding of GNOME/Mono developer Miguel de Icaza as a “traitor” for his involvement with Microsoft’s CodePlex — sealed the decision for him. He didn’t want to publish any more software under the GPL as part of his way of distancing himself from the FSF generally…