Not much of a choice, if one involves:

1) begrudgingly adopting a licence you don't like or want

over:

2) re-creating man years (or decades) of effort to reproduce a certain project

Especially if you lack the programming skills or money, it's not a choice at all -- you only have one option.

So in those cases you "don't chose GPL" -- you chose the project you want to use, AND have to necessarily suffer GPL too because of that choice.

Have you considered why the original authors chose the GPL? It's so people who use their code will never take away the freedom of users of the code. If you're complaining about not being able to take their code and make it proprietary, you're missing the point that THAT'S WHY THEY CHOSE THE GPL.

That's orthogonal to whether the prospective user of the package has an actual choice or not (besides using as GPL it or going without).

WHATEVER THE ORIGINAL AUTHORS' REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE GPL (sic), it doesn't change the situation that one might not be happy for a project they want to use being in GPL -- including people who don't intend to make it proprietary, but who prefer BSD licenses nevertheless.

> That's orthogonal to whether the prospective user of the package has an actual choice or not (besides using as GPL it or going without).

You've just outlined the choice that the person has. Admittedly, I wouldn't use the GPL for libraries, I've started using the MPLv2 for stuff like that. I don't really agree with the common reading of the combined work clause in the GPL wrt libraries (a work that uses a library's API shouldn't be bound by the copyleft of the GPL IMO -- but as Oracle has proven, APIs appear to be copyrightable).

> WHATEVER THE ORIGINAL AUTHORS' REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE GPL (sic), it doesn't change the situation that one might not be happy for a project they want to use being in GPL -- including people who don't intend to make it proprietary, but who prefer BSD licenses nevertheless.

BSD licenses allow distributors of the software to make it proprietary. That was clearly a more important problem to the author and community of the software than allowing GPL-incompatible projects to use the code. It's a fundamentally ethical decision, which you may disagree with if you follow the open source (as opposed to free software) philosophy.

You're missing the point. He's saying that there's technically a choice, yes. You agree on that.

The part you seem to avoid agreeing with is that it can often be a really annoying choice to have to make. Isn't everybody entitled to be annoyed when they only have one so-called choice? (Like having to move or use slower alternatives in order to get away from Comcast as your ISP.)

Continually pointing out that there is technically a choice doesn't really help anyone who feels bitten by their lack of choices.

You don't get the right to be annoyed when you have to comply with the license terms of something that you haven't had to spend time working on (and usually get without paying for it).

No. Not when in exchange for that "annoyance" (not really an annoyance at all), you get a lot of stuff for free.