"heading towards"? I'd say we're there.
And it's been a while coming. I wrongly discounted Stallman. Like many, I found the GPL onerous and annoying to deal with as a developer. But we've paid a high price.
That said, what I had in mind when I licensed my code were start-ups and small+medium businesses. It didn't occur to me that behemoths like Amazon might stripmine open source and fail to contribute back. Even though the permissive licenses permit this kind of behavior, it seems exploitative.
Additionally, as the GP mentions, we're at the point where it's primarily massive tech companies who can afford to develop ambitious open source projects.
Far more importantly, it also failed to occur to me that tech companies would become the new railroads -- massive monopolies that dominate society, the economy, culture, politics, etc. When I started in open source, Microsoft had recently been slapped down by antitrust regulators, there was no social media, and the tech ecosystem - particularly the open source ecosystem - was much, much different. It was more democratic, egalitarian, and balanced.
Granted, as far as I know, it has been small and medium sized companies that have used my own open source code. I'm not aware of any of the Big 5 using it (my most popular libaries have been superceded by newer/better projects anyway).
Nonetheless, I would have been more wary of philosophically supporting permissive licenses had I fully realized the implications.
These are social and political problems, you can't fix them by sitting in your basement writing copyleft code anymore than you fix them by writing permissively licensed code.
It's not like the FAANG's of the world would go, oh no we really want to use this copyleft library, oh well, let's release all our code under a copyleft license as well. They'd just use some other code with a more permissive license, or then they would reimplement the needed functionality themselves.
This is true. But just because you can't fix something by yourself, doesn't mean that you should contribute to, or participate in, the problem.
What price?
But maintaining a fork is not everyone's cup of tea.
It is not in the interest or benefit of the community if everyone makes or is forced to make his/her own fork. Forces should be joined, not scattered.
I think a big fallacy with regard to the GPL is that companies don't contribute to open source because the license forces them to. Companies contribute to open source because it makes more sense to collaborate on some projects rather than each work on their own.
Licenses like GPL etc. are great for ensuring their user's freedom; but they don't really incentivise companies to contribute to them at all. Instead, they prevent some companies from using them. So counter-intuitively project with liberal licenses end up with much more contributions than projects with strong licenses...
QNX, WxWorks, Windows Embedded, Windows CE (RIP), NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2 Warp, Plan 9, Inferno, RiscOS, ReactOS...
It's a shame what happened to BeOS - I wonder what would have happened if BeOS was open-sourced when the expected Apple buyout fizzled and the company went-under instead of it simply disappearing - that would have put a huge damper on, say, Ubuntu and other Linux desktop projects because the whole selling-point of them being "the only usable desktop alternative to Windows on non-Apple hardware!" wouldn't be true.