Agreed on our differences.

One real life use that actually happened to me was GPL forbidding addition of terms and conditions. You cannot force the customer to sign an NDA that prevents the distribution of the modified GPL code. Neither can you put a term and insist the software may only be used in pre-production hardware. The license nullifies any such agreements the moment the customer receives your product.

We did actually plan to release it publicly, just "not now, not until everything is working and stable for our new widget". Our direct customers were specifically looking for Linux kernel support so they can get working drivers on early access hardware, they might not even be using the exact same reference design as us, they are planning to sell it the moment the widget was announced to the public. In the end the customers convinced the legal and management to upstream the code to the kernel.org developers so that similar hardware based on the original reference design will simply just work out of the box.