The base system consists of the kernel, toolchain, shell, and standard daemons. For the base system it is true that we prefer permissively licensed components. Today there are a few components that are not permissively licensed, and there is a plan with credible replacements for them.
However, I don't think it will help the parent post. Doing a base install, and wading through all the contrib packages and build a custom operative system is not the most practical thing to do. There are a reason why Debian has so many derivatives that picks and chose between the 40,000 applications laying around in debian repository. This is (in my view) the primary reason why Ubuntu has more installs than Debian, even if debian has more total available packages.
(As a side note: Thanks to your post I went and looked at ports collection and noticed that freeBSD do include many ported linux drivers through ports collection. The statement that I read earlier about porting was thus wrong, as BSD developers will port linux drivers to freeBSD - just not for the freeBSD base install. They also include a linux emulator which makes a linxu vs bsd comparison a bit more muddy.)
In the FreeBSD world the PC-BSD project (http://www.pcbsd.org) provides an operating system focused on the end-user experience, with a convenient "out-of-the-box" configuration. They track FreeBSD development closely and in general use exactly the same source - primarily changing configuration and tuning options.
From their website: PC-BSD is a desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. Rather than having the user build their own environment from the base operating system, PC-BSD aims to make the FreeBSD experience easy and achievable for the average "casual" computer user.
It's more a "can't" than a "won't". They can't incorporate GPL code into the BSD kernel without violating the GPL.
LGPL-licensed code might be something they could port as a pluggable driver, though don't quote me on the details there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#2-clause_license_...
Assuming that FreeBSD's maintainers want to keep their code under the BSD license, they'll be wanting something more permissive than the FSF's "heads I win tails you lose" version of compatibility.
Am I missing something about the BSD kernel licensing social dynamic?
Now if you changed your hypothetical so that it's not a patch but a separate module that compiles to its own distinct binary, and your hypothetical license were expanded to include a second clause, "Anything that links to binaries built from this code must inherit this license," then we'd be talking about a situation that replicates the issues with making use of GPL code in projects that use more permissive licenses.
(The CDDL is decidedly not permissive, of course, but its a far cry from being more restrictive than the GPL.)
Complaining that FreeBSD has strict licensing requirements is like complaining that the Linux kernel has strict licensing requirements- they don't, they just have project-wide standards for licensing. Ubuntu (or Linux distros in general, or PC-BSD for that matter) is less of a project and more of a collection of components from different sources, so by definition it's not going to attempt to impose its own licensing requirements on those third parties.
Think of it like this: if the Linux kernel project evolved in a different way, such that the project as managed by Linus wasn't just the kernel but also the required low-level userland (libc, /bin/ls, etc.), then you'd end up with something that closely resembles FreeBSD. No one would use this hypothetical "Linux kernel plus low-level userland" project by itself, they would install it and then install whatever else they wanted from other sources on top of it. There would still be all sorts of distros that made it easy to do this. Ubuntu would still exist, except structurally it would more closely resemble the relationship between PC-BSD and FreeBSD.
One of the good reasons to like BSD´s is because of its licence, not the opposite
Ubuntu include anything from proprietary freeware blobs, to GPL, to permissive licensed software. So long the inclusion improves the practical use, it is included. The more ideological free software operative systems excludes the proprietary freeware blobs, but keeps the GPL licensed and permissive licensed software. FreeBSD excluded both proprietary freeware blobs and GPL licensed software, and only uses software that is permissive licensed accordantly to the OSI standard. This methodology also cover driver support for hardware, as they won't port a linux driver to BSD if the linux driver is GPL.
However, most commonly used GPL software has an permissive alternative, so if you are lucky, using those alternative won't impact you too much. On the server side, I would think that is more true than for the laptop.