An interesting thing, to me, about the GPL is that it's possible for companies to use it as an anti-competitive weapon against each other. A company who owns or has been assigned the copyright to an entire codebase is able to hold the exclusive right to profit from hidden modifications of it. Oracle is in this position right now with mysql, for example. GNU itself, were it so inclined (though it obviously isn't), would be as well.
This becomes even more significant when talking about the AGPL and its limitations on using it as a service. 10gen is the only company that could run a proprietary uber-version of MongoDB, and that right persists effectively forever.
When it comes to more open licenses like BSD no one holds this as an exclusive right.
Arguably that problem is worse with permissively licensed software. In that case you don't just have the original copyright holder peddling a proprietary uber-version, you have every company and his dog doing it and every version is expensive and/or incompatible with each other.
I don't see how it can be considered worse. I could see even, but not worse. Does it matter if it's one or ten organizations that are taking advantage of the ability to make proprietary software out of open source code? At least with ten there might actually be competition.
But realistically, it's not like permissive licenses are a new thing and this apocalypse doesn't seem to be a very common occurrence in practice.
I think if the FSF could get away with a clause akin to "once licensed under the GPL, this software can not be licensed under any other license for distribution, and it's license can not be changed by the copyright holder".
But that wouldn't fly. Ever. At the end of the day, the copyright holder still gets to change their license whenever they want, and the license itself can't deny that, because it would never hold up in court.
It wouldn't fly, because to the copyright holder, the license simply doesn't apply. At all. You only need a license if you're restricted by copyright law from doing what you're doing, but copyright law doesn't restrict the holder themselves.
This becomes even more significant when talking about the AGPL and its limitations on using it as a service. 10gen is the only company that could run a proprietary uber-version of MongoDB, and that right persists effectively forever.
When it comes to more open licenses like BSD no one holds this as an exclusive right.