[lelanthran]

> If anything, corporations seem to use Linux despite the GPL, because it has collected the best hardware support of any of the Free / Libre OS options.

Well, yes, that's my point: It didn't get the best hardware support by allowing vendors to close of every single driver.[1]

It's collected the best hardware support because those hardware manufacturers who write drivers contributed those drivers back to mainline, hence the reason for Linux's dominance over the competing FLOSS OSes.

Compare to the BSDs, who collected NO hardware support from Apple.

> I can only say that the folks I've worked with don't bat an eye at MIT or BSD or Apache licensed dependencies, but know to ask about the GPL and avoid.

Maybe they ask, and maybe they avoid. My experience with those (very rare) clients who avoid is that they want to take a 99.99% complete solution, add their 0.01% contribution, and lock the resulting product up.

> I think one has to be careful about grand narratives. They often leave out crucial details while painting a version of things as we want them to have happened, as opposed to the messy haphazard way things tend to happen. Hindsight is 20:20, but rose colored glasses can still throw it off.

I agree, but note that I did not come to this opinion quickly nor rashly. It was carefully considered, while taking into account the behaviour of corporations and communities over the history of my involvement as a professional developer (i.e. mid-90s).

IOW, this is not an opinion that I have held for 30 years, it's an opinion that I have formed after watching the industry for 29 years. It'd be quite hard to claim that my opinion is an uninformed or rose-tinted one.

[1] Nvidia shows that, with enough effort, vendors could have closed off the drivers anyway. But there's less friction in simply throwing the driver to the community and letting it get maintained, as opposed to writing shims and binary blobs which the vendor still has to maintain.

[timschmidt]

My experience is that vendors have written very few of the drivers in the Linux kernel, and that most vendor drivers remain proprietary. Nvidia's being the most visible, Intel Poulsbo's being another despised example, most of Android's drivers are also closed and hiding behind an extensive shim framework, Dell even wrote DKIM to help deal with all of the proprietary vendor drivers for the subset of machines on which they offer Linux.

Linux's wealth of open source drivers seem to come almost exclusively from it's community, instead. Which, but for a Finnish university student, could have just as easily coalesced around FreeBSD.