> By making everything licensed with the absolute bottom wrung restrictions, you're just made it even easier for corpos to have free pickings of any given tool on the internet to incorporate into their own tools and have never-ending Amazon and Elasticsearch situations.

I've already given plenty of examples of BSD-licensed coreutils. If an evil corporation wanted to steal coreutils, they wouldn't need to take the Rust implementation. And as a bonus, if they took FreeBSD/OpenBSD/whatever, they'd get a project that's far more mature too.

It is, after all, exactly what Apple did with Darwin.

> Obviously the community wouldn't even be here to begin with if it wasn't for Linux going with a GPLv2 license.

That's survivor bias and doesn't fall in line with my experiences using Linux and BSD in the 90s.

BSD originally had a bigger community than Linux for quite a while. What accelerated Linux wasn't the license; it was the hacker culture.

BSD systems were tightly controlled ecosystems, whereas Linux was a free-for-all because the kernel was managed by a different developer to the guy who managed GNU. So everything about the GNU/Linux ecosystem was disparate projects slapped together. This encouraged others to slap their own parts to GNU/Linux. This is why fsck needed to exist: the file system was slapped together so Linux needed a way to fix file corruptions. It's why there's different package managers and why the concept of a "distribution" exists in the first place.

It's what made Linux approachable and it meant development on Linux happened at a much faster pace than on BSD.

Then all of those hackers got jobs. Became managers. And recommended Linux because it's what they learned "UNIX" on.

Linux was basically the original "move fast and break things". If it had been licensed MIT then nothing would have changed.

> I suspect, should there come a time in the future where we realize that this may have been a critical error, it'll be far too late to correct it.

The GPL vs BSD argument is probably older than you've been alive. It's probably older than a considerable number of HNers have been alive. And it's been proven time and time again that it's an ideological debate that has no practical truth. Hence why people stopped arguing it.