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A nice compact explanation for permissive vs. copyleft licensing I found:

Both models provide freedom and protection at the expense of the developer;
Permissive model provides more freedom and protection for your *immediate downstream user* at the expense of the end user;
Copyleft model provides more freedom and protection for your *end user* at the expense of the intermediate users.

It's pretty context-dependent which way you wanna go, but personally, in a toss-up, I'm gonna side with the end user. Because that's what actually matters in the end: the ability to actually use the software freely.

At the end of the day, if I have to use a proprietary, locked-down system that spies on me, doesn't let me modify it, or even look at its insides, and generally treats me, the user, like crap, it doesn't make a nick of difference to me that it has a BSD kernel inside, or MIT-licensed coreutils, right?