>As far as Coursera, it didn't exist in Fall. It was created in response to Stanford lawyers and bureaucrats going apeshit and shutting the venture down once they saw what a threat it was since the classes were as good as what they were charging for.
This is confused. Coursera didn't announce it's presence until very recently. It's existed as a stealth-mode startup for a while.
Look at who is actually doing the work, not the press releases. The first class is co-taught by Anant Agarwal, the director of CSAIL, Jerry Sussman, who is a founding director of the FSF, and Piotr Mitros, who has been active in the free software community since the nineties.
My impression is that by numbers, we're moving from big projects -- like Linux, LibreOffice, Gnome, KDE, Gimp, gcc, etc. -- to smaller projects -- small JavaScript libraries on github that people fork, merge, etc.
GPL makes a lot of sense for the former. If you write the Linux kernel, a ton of companies would take it, enhance it, and not contribute back without GPL. That's a big part of what killed BSD. On the other hand, almost no one is going to reimplement Linux just to get around the GPL -- it's cheaper and easier to just give back.
For the little libraries, permissive makes more sense. If your JavaScript control has a license that isn't permitted in my project, I'll just write my own in a day or two. If I enhance it, that's not a core advantage to my business, so I'll likely contribute it back.
What distinction do you see between CC-SSA and GPL? They say essentially the same thing. CC-SS has the same viral nature as the GPL/LGPL (it's about halfway in between the two).
The GPL has a lot of FUD about it, but there's very little actually offensive about it.