Why? What does a GPL license let you do that you can't do with a BSD license?

If the base is BSD licensed, why would commercial users not use the base rather than the GPL one?

So that, if they have a business need, they can avoid the requirement to share their source code per the GPL one. It's not a universal business need. See Red Hat, Suse, and Canonical for examples.

>Why? What does a GPL license let you do that you can't do with a BSD license?

I believe that bad people should not have access to good software. Bad people are incentivized to do sneaky things, and therefore, they avoid GPL software because it legally binds them to be open and honest about their software. Take what happened with MINIX and Intel ME for example. MINIX has a permissive license that Intel exploited in ways that I'd bet most people here agree are net a negative. If MINIX had been GPL licensed, then Intel would have just chosen an alternative for Management Engine, but at least the options available (i.e., attack surface) would have been reduced.

I even support the SSPL. I don't care if it doesn't meet the pure definition of "open source" because what matters more to me is that it prevents large companies from abusing those who do most of the work supporting FOSS.

I believe that a successful GPL-licenced BSD is possible, and I'd take delight in knowing that big tech companies would be disincentivized to used it for some surveillance capitalism product i.e. Google's plans for Fuchsia.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...

I guess I understand that, although it doesn't match my philosophy; but as described where HEAD is BSD and release branches (or similar) are GPL, it just doesn't seem compelling. Release changes aren't nothing, but most of the stuff happens in HEAD, so...

If you really want BSD ancestors encumbered by GPL or whatever, you've got to do more of a hard fork and add something compelling after the fork.

On philosophy re MINIX etc. If I'm writing software and releasing it to the world, I want people to use it. If I think I've got the best OS, why wouldn't I want people to be able to use it in their products? I want the world to have better products, and that means embedded computers running embedded operating systems should run my OS.