Comment by vegetablepotpie

As someone working on a product that uses open source, GPL makes development more complex.

With a permissive license, I can make a decision, with my manager, to use a technology based on its merit.

Office bureaucrats get weird when you talk about the GPL. When using it, I have to involve lawyers in the company, they don’t understand why the technology is important, but they have a bunch of questions, and to answer them it takes up time from my team. Upper management is involved and wants to know if we can use anything else, or they’ll phrase it as a question like: why can’t you use anything else? You have to deal with a lot more office politics when you use GPL instead of doing development work. So I’d say that’s the biggest downside for developers is that it wastes their time.