> Why you want to release code to the public at all if it isn't simply a donation to all human knowledge.

On the contrary. I donate my code to all human knowledge. Just not to corporate's private code corpus. I intend my code to be open to all humans to run, study, modify and share, forever. I don't give you the freedom to take it to a closed domain, and not share the further knowledge you derived from my code. If your primary intention is to return this knowledge to human kind, GPL is an enabler, not an hinderer.

> I personally would be thrilled to know my work was valuable enough to be used by a company because I really just couldn't care less that about the "credit" part of it. I know what I've done and don't have anything to prove.

I personally don't care whether my code is good enough to be used by a company. If I want to contribute code which can be used by a company, I can contribute to MIT projects (which I also do). I don't have anything to prove.

I release my code with the hope it'd be useful for somebody, and I don't want it to be included in any permissive or closed source base. Doesn't matter it saves your beef for today or not. That's not my problem. Go write a better one, then. I don't care.