If they really wanted to be a team player, they wouldn’t be clearly avoiding the GPL. Valve are being better. When a company is going out their way to not have to contribute it is because there is stuff they don’t want to. Same with Apple and Sun before them, and endless others. If the BSD ideal worked, the BSDs would be the biggest Unix like distros community. The whole reason copyleft exists is because of the “tragedy of the commons” BSD keeps suffering from. Even if a few companies contribute some of it back, some times.

Does happen though. Better to have the option and not often use it, than not have the option at all.

You can look it and go “yeah, it is shit, but I see what it is doing, it is better done like this” and push that upstream. Saves time reverse engineering.

Even if they did (I think they did) it has to be compatible with when they did. So it undeniable BSD helped TCP/IP rule them all.

Well there was a few before GNU came along. Including versions of UNIX itself. It’s just GNU was free, and then, because of contributions, became better. LLVM was originally something the emulation world was into. It meant your JIT could be cross platform. That how I encountered it. It became something for the permissive/coportates to fight GCC later. Having actual competition has made GCC better and it hasn’t lost to Clang/LLVM. The closed stuff didn’t really compete as much just lock people in so didn’t have to.

The TCP/IP stack is a good example where permissive is helpful. Getting a protocol stack adopted. In a world of a mix of open and closed, permissive can paper over cracks.

There basically isn’t FreeBSD do for gaming as their work is locked away and not shared. If there was no BSD, Sony would have been forced to use a copyleft OS, or make their own. There was a time, a long time ago, where NetBSD was used in routers, etc. But Linux hardware support got to be so much better than NetBSDs, it got to hard to not use it. The more who used, and where forced to open their work, the better Linux got. Today it’s all Linux.

Worth pointing out Oracle/Sun and IBM and OpenOffice. Before the buyout, Sun were changing the OpenOffice license to permissive in a version they would sell to IBM who used the code for their closed Lotus Office. This could be done as OpenOffice had a contributor lience agreement where copyright was handed over. So Sun had all the copyright, so could relience at will. When Oracle bought Sun, it was the final straw. So LibreOffice was born from the copyleft version, without copyright ownership, so locked open. All the development moved there. Oracle relicensed OpenOffice to permissive, and tried donating the project to Apache, but no one cared. It’s been a husk for well over a decade now. And thing good can be copied straight into LibreOffice, but not the other way round. The free money for OpenOffice is over for Oracle, as is the cheap code for IBM. LibreOffice healthier than OpenOffice ever was.