> concrete examples of how the GPL directly benefited the projects you mentioned? The GPL is the reason for many source-code contributions. Compare this to the

> concrete examples of how the GPL directly benefited the projects you mentioned? The GPL is the reason for many source-code contributions. Compare this to the way Sony use FreeBSD to power their PS3 and PS4 consoles and contribute little back to the FreeBSD project. There are other reasons companies may contribute changes, including that it spares them the trouble of rebasing their fork, and it may earn them goodwill, but copyleft is a strong reason too. A good concrete example really is that of compilers. Apple used to begrudgingly contribute code to GCC, as the GPL required them to. LLVM has no such requirement, so we see proprietary forks crop up. [0] If I were to contribute to a project like GCC or LLVM, I'd rather my work didn't end up in some non-Free fork. That Apple later invested in LLVM turned out to be pretty great for everyone. GCC is still doing fine, and we have another industry-strength Free Software compiler suite. I'd rather Apple didn't use a proprietary fork for their own secret-sauce, but I can't be too grumpy given how well LLVM/Clang has done. > there were occasions where it let free software ideology get in the way of technical excellence It's an FSF project, so this criticism doesn't really land. FSF projects are not aiming for technical excellence at any cost. It's a bit like saying Free-range ideology gets in the way of my food budgeting. I don't know much about the specifics of GCC here. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Optimizing_C/C%2B%2B_Compiler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Optimizing_C/C%2B%2B_Compi...