> A significant part of the reason why I avoid GPL software like the plague is all of the horrible schemes owners of GPL software have come up with in order to monetize their supposedly "free" software.
These schemes wouldn't be necessary if industry would start paying for the stuff they use. And I wouldn't call it a "scheme" when the deal is clear - you either pay by giving money to the author or by giving source code to your users. Choice is yours, and since you are developing proprietary program you shouldn't really have any qualms with the first approach, unless you are a leech.
The one surefire way to ensure that you never get a big corporate sponsorship: ship your code with a GPL license.
Industry does in fact sponsor a LOT of permissively-licensed opensource software. Apache. Webkit. Android. openssh. boost. x11. VSCode. react. jQuery. node.js. Ruby on Rails. llvm. The International Components for Unicode project. Mono (and now .net!). And an endless list of opensource libraries published by Google and Microsoft (and others). To cite really big examples. But there is a very long list of smaller examples as well.
And the way I pay personally is by releasing my own software under a permissive license that respects and honors the intent of those whose permissively-licensed libraries are used by my project.
Respectfully, I think it might be time to move on, and accept the fact that GPL is a failed experiment that has been superceded by permissive licenses.
These schemes wouldn't be necessary if industry would start paying for the stuff they use. And I wouldn't call it a "scheme" when the deal is clear - you either pay by giving money to the author or by giving source code to your users. Choice is yours, and since you are developing proprietary program you shouldn't really have any qualms with the first approach, unless you are a leech.