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by desumeku 453 days ago
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.
3 comments

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 already prefer macOS over Linux for my desktop, to Apple’s great benefit
I genuinely don't follow your point.
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.