Is it anti-gpl or anti-gpl3? It seems from a public relations perspective gpl3 really lost a lot of mindshare in the open source world, including me.

It's anti-GPL. Remember, a large target audience of HN are entrepreneurs, who want to use open source components in their closed-source applications that they're selling. (A)GPL prevents them from doing this, (not selling, but keeping it closed source, which many see as being important to selling) so they get pissed.

A large part of HN is developers who like to release good code and let anyone use it as they see fit.

GPL has neither of those goals and actively works against the latter.

> actively works against the latter.

For your definition of 'anyone.' BSD software often does not let the end user use it as they see fit, as they no longer have access to the source code.

How does BSD remove access to source code?

Someone else may add some modifications to my code and I may not be able to see those modifications, true. But nothing's been removed.

That's not true for me and I suspect for a lot of other people here.

If I'm going to release code under a license, I need to understand every line in that license. GPLv2 is pretty understandable, GPLv3 is ponderous in places and ambiguous in others (needs lawyers and lawsuits to understand), and AGPL is simply around the bend. Loopholes you could drive a truck through.

I don't want to use GPLv3 or AGPL until their ambiguous bits have been clarified, but their adoption has been pretty low so that may never happen. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on your point of view.

Also, the GPLv2 vs GPLv3 fragmentation has turned off a lot of people.

I want to spend my time coding, not worrying about license issues and lawsuits.