All popular free software under a permissive license ends up in proprietary
software programs. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeBSD#Commercial_products
for instance. Many of those "products" are vastly more popular than FreeBSD.
Yet, many of them would have not existed without the work of FreeBSD
developers. Without FreeBSD's permissive license, Apple might have died in
the 2000s.
According to the article, the GPL "fails" at letting a company reuse free
software in proprietary software. It is a success, not a failure. It is by
design. The GPL is chosen by developers who do not want to indirectly help
proprietary software subjugate users. Regardless of the number of lines they
wrote. And, contrary to what the article says, the GPL does not prevent any
"good citizen" from releasing patches to the program. They can even choose a
permissive license, but once integrated to the GPL code, it will be
relicensed under the GPL.
The problem is that a "good citizen" is, in the article, a company who ships
proprietary software products. I (and other developers who choose the GPL)
would rather call that company a "bad citizen": it harms society by inviting
users to surrender their freedoms. In the end, that article complains that
developers take permissively-licensed code to make programs that respect user
freedoms, and it praises companies who take permissively-licensed code to
make user-subjugating programs...
