alt Hacker News> The fact that very large corporations are willing to spend tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to replicate software is exactly why the GPL is not irrelevant.
No, it's the opposite. The premise of copyleft is forcing the dependents to contribute back to the community. If the corporations are writing proprietary replacements instead of contributing, copyleft has failed to deliver on its premise.
In practice, permissively-licensed projects get more contributions back and benefit the community more. Simple as that.
We have no data on how much has not been contributed back due to corporations forking code or just copy pasting it into other projects. For all you know permissive licenses have dramatically reduced contributions back.
We only know when they contribute, we have no data on when they don't. Stories like LLVM are good evidence for what you are saying, but the linux kernel is good evidence against it. Dozens of companies are forced to work together for the common good at a scale and level of resources that is unprecedented. Without the GPL this simply wouldn't (actually from an economic / game theory standpoint it couldn't) happen.