Yes, and if BSD was what everyone used for servers instead of Linux, then there would be nothing stopping Oracle from selling you Oracle BSD for a nice subscription price. Of course, they and red hat are already doing this in their own way that gets around the GPL, but a more permissive license would just allow them to do it even more.

Of all the things that constitute a value ad that might allow Oracle or any other company to sell a premium operating system and do away with reciprocal licensing, the core utilities aren’t it. There are already permissively, licensed versions of most of those tools. If people want to champion the GPL and so forth, this is not the hill to die on it’s not really even a hill. It’s a mole hill. That’s not to say that I undervalue the worth of these utilities, but they are not something that people are going to pay premium prices for.

You don’t need to imagine. Apple ships macOS with a BSD user space. The sky has not fallen.

If Linux was the way macOS is, nobody would use it. They'd use macOS, to Apple's great benefit.

I genuinely don't follow your point.

I already prefer macOS over Linux for my desktop, to Apple’s great benefit

There's nothing stopping Oracle from selling us Oracle Linux for a nice subscription price either. The GPL is explicitly not meant to prevent commercialisation of software.

What exactly is this BSD world that you speak of? The one that was mined by corporations for years and whom never gave back anything (except value to Apple shareholders). Compare with Linux which was adopted by corporations and were legally forced to give back. Which made more progress?

> never gave back anything

Apart from Clang/LLVM and WebKit you mean?

Ok in fairness the LGPL license of KHTML was a huge reason the WebKit source was available (for ages it was just reluctant tarball dumps) but I don't think that's the case for LLVM.

I don't think the GPL has really meant corporation's have given back significantly to Linux. There are still plenty of closed source drivers. The main motivation to give back is the extremely high cost of maintaining out-of-tree modifications (e.g. Android's binder).

LLVM has spawned probably a dozen vendor supplied toolchains that you never see the source for, best of luck figuring out why your program didn't compile correctly, or adding support for something other than the tools/languages provided.

The compiler and toolchain really are going the wrong direction with LLVM in terms of open source.

Yes Apple's clang weird ass versioning causes all sorts of problems too

Some proprietary-friendly compiler would've appeared in one way or another at some point. I'd rather such at least have some amount of openness. Better than many crappy from-scratch completely-proprietary vendor compilers at least.

And hey some of the work does get upstreamed, which is probably a good choice for the vendor anyway if the target in question isn't intended to be immediately thrown in the thrash and forgotten.

>Ok in fairness the LGPL license of KHTML was a huge reason the WebKit source was available (for ages it was just reluctant tarball dumps) but I don't think that's the case for LLVM.

It was originally supposed to. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...