In the scenario you’re describing, when I write my own code, I am limited in what license I can pick for that code because of licensing choices other people made.
But you're not actually restricted from doing anything, are you? What is it exactly you want to do that other people's choice of GPL prevents? Steal their work and sell it? Oh how unfair!
We are talking about a hypothetical universe in which nearly all software is GPL, such that it is almost impossible to write useful software without building upon other GPL code. In such a universe, licensing "your" code as MIT would indeed be unfair, because you would be taking the work of others, illegally stripping the label, and making it available to profitable interests to use without compensation to the original developers against their express wishes - said compensation merely being the extremely reasonable request to share back, as you were shared to.
You still haven't really explained why you're so keen on doing that sort of thing.
> licensing "your" code as MIT would indeed be unfair, because you would be taking the work of others, illegally stripping the label, and making it available to profitable interests to use without compensation to the original developers against their express wishes
I'm not sure why there are quotes around "your".
If I write code and license it MIT, but it includes code that has a different non-GPL license (lets say Apache), my code is MIT-licensed, and the included code is still Apache-licensed.
I haven't illegally (or legally) stripped any licenses, or changed how it's available to others. I've picked a license for code I wrote, and the developers of code I took a dependency on picked a license for their code. People who want to use my code have to consider the license of my code and also the dependencies I used.
The GPL is largely unique in its desire to control what license I can pick for my own code.
I'm keen on picking my own license for my own code because I personally don't want to block my code from being used by anybody, commercially or otherwise. I've got no issue with developers who do want to prevent closed-source, commercial, or any other kind of downstream usage. And I'm happy to comply with the licenses of code that I leverage as part of my code. I do take issue with developers who want to impose their licensing preferences on my code.
