My path has been pretty much opposite: a long time ago, I was a big fan of BSD-flavored freedom and thought that commercial adoption of open technology was the

My path has been pretty much opposite: a long time ago, I was a big fan of BSD-flavored freedom and thought that commercial adoption of open technology was the best thing that could happen. After years of eating my own dogfood and seeing open code used solely as free work, with no regard to user or developer freedom, I'm not so convinced. Frankly, I was cynically happy when a lot of GNU projects were licensed under GPLv3, and suddenly everyone who locks down their firmware (which is usually a big hunk of GPL code + a piece of shit web UI) was sent scrambling for alternatives and, gasp, even having to -- hear this! -- pay for the software that they proceed to resell. Outrageous. It also fueled the development of really good alternatives. It did make my life more difficult, but I'm satisfied that it also made life more difficult for companies that lock down their users and whose business model is largely planned obsolescence + no privacy. (Note that this is heavily skewed towards embedded systems :-) ) One thing I still considerably like about BSD-type licenses is that they do not incentivize "community leadership and involvement" and half-baked upstream contributions for the sake of companies being seen as "thought-leaders" in their respective "communities". It does mean less upstream support for a lot of things (most visibly drivers), but it also means that crap in-house hacks stay in-house rather than being "contributed back" to communities whose users don't really want them, but don't really have a choice now that the community leaders are largely corporations engaging in free software circlejerking. This involvement for marketing's sake is a big part of why using a Linux system is so painful nowadays, six or seven years after it no longer needed to be so painful.