>providing the user with the best products
You've completely missed the point of the article, and the entire purpose of Free Software, if you think this is about 'providing users with products' and generating a return on investment.
You've completely missed the point of the article, and the entire purpose of Free Software, if you think this is about 'providing users with products' and generating a return on investment.
In who's eyes?
Consumers want the best product.
Investors want a payout.
How does GPL satisfy either of these?
GPL doesn't have the nimbleness to be viable with the market. It doesn't respect creativity and time of developers or investors - leaving consumers left to pick a proprietary / permissive alternative.
You don't need to be GPL to be open: You can MIT/BSD/Apache and still volunteer to not give out binary blobs [1]
[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435
That's fine but it's only one level deep. What about the people that download your source and accept the terms of your license? They are totally free to make binary blobs and refuse to give source to their downloaders or their changes back to you.
The GPL directly addresses that and keeps the code free, no matter who gets it from who. It's really the only way to guarantee software freedom.
Investors want a quicker payout.
That's basically the economic argument for Open Source.
How does the GPL support this better than complicit licenses?
You'll have to pay me to find out. Because market.