[AntiImperialis2]

If you're building a hardware and have to ship it with an OS, Linux is the obvious choice for most... but the GPL licensing makes it very difficult for a lot others.

There's a reason a lot of open source in recent years have avoided GPL as a plague and opted for BSD or MIT or Apache licenses.

[j1elo]

> Linux is the obvious choice for most... but the GPL licensing makes it very difficult for a lot others

Linux stayed on GPL2 instead of upgrading to GPL3 precisely to allow others freely using Linux in their commercial devices. In other words: they made the intentional choice of making it legally easy to embed Linux in proprietary hardware products (aka. Tivoization, which GPL2 allows but GPL3 forbids)

[AntiImperialis2]

That's true.

GPL2 is better for commercialization than GPL3 is. However, BSD, MIT, Apache are much much better than any GPL version, including AGPL.

[pjmlp]

Yeah PS4 has done wonders to upstream FreeBSD.

[AntiImperialis2]

I'm sure they've made some contributions but I'm not sure if they've done "wonders". But thats the beauty of the BSD license. Not only do you have freedom to use the software, you also have freedom to not give back your modifications if you choose not to.

[pjmlp]

Which is why FreeBSD has taken the world of UNIX by storm and is now the main UNIX clone in existence. /s

[AntiImperialis3]

Let's see. Modified version of BSD OS runs on iOS devices, Macbooks, PS4s.

Chromium uses BSD license and browsers based on Chromium, including Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera run everywhere.

BSD is much more prevalent than GPL and software written in BSD-style licenses will carry on into the future as even fewer people will be willing to touch anything GPL.