Yeah, Gross! GPLv3 is so restrictive – I hate free software licenses, it gives you too much freedom.

You do realise that GPLv3 grants the user less freedoms than a license like MIT, right?

No, the GPLv3 grants the user more freedoms than a license like MIT - they can demand the source from someone who has provided them the binary. It grants potential distributors fewer freedoms - they must provide sources and cannot distribute under incompatible licenses.

When I said "user" I meant "developer". Most of my open source code is licensed under the MIT license because it grants developers more freedoms than a GPL-like license would.

Also, I believe that by allowing distributors to use your code without forcing them to release their code you don't restrict potential users' freedoms - if a company wanted to use your library in their project and your license is not compatible with it they will just find another project or write a similar one themselves. The result for the user is the same: they will not get access to the code.

For "developer" it is substantially more true than it is for "user", to be sure. In principle, the power to demand the source gives me more freedom as a developer too - where with an MIT licensed executable I might not be able to find the code - but I'll readily admit that that aspect of it, when the author means the code to be distributed, is not terribly likely to be important when stuff lives on GitHub or even SourceForge or whatever.

As a developer, though, I'd rather have more code I can read and learn from and tweak and borrow than yet another proprietary product that I'll probably ignore - even if you're giving me 10x more of the latter.

In the world of GNU any mention of "freedom" refers to end users.

…because, in case someone hasn't noticed already, there are are more end users than programmers.

And frequently programmers are users as well!

The "freedom" that GPL gives is qualitatively no different than the notion of "freedom" in a free country. Freedom in a free country does not legally allow me to take away the freedom and rights enjoyed by another citizen. I can still do so, but that comes with legal consequences. GPL is likewise.

No I don't ... because the GNU GPLv3 guarantees, more than any other license, user freedom. The only other license that might guarantee more user freedom in this case is the the GNU AGPLv3. Sorry, but the MIT license does little more than protect a developer from being liable, it does almost nothing to promote freedom.

Well, frequently components intended to be used so broadly, and which become more valuable with more users (because more people speak the language) get weaker licenses. There are pros and cons to this from most perspectives, but it's a (weak) surprise.