The draw for BSD is the BSD license - it is not a "copyleft" license, you do not have to redistribute source to those whom you provide with binaries. Same reas

The draw for BSD is the BSD license - it is not a "copyleft" license, you do not have to redistribute source to those whom you provide with binaries. Same reason Intel chose MINIX over Linux for the Intel Management Engine. As such, Linux will never fully substitute for the use-cases that BSD provides. More or less - BSD focuses on developer freedoms while GPL focuses on end-user freedoms. GPL does not provide you the ability to redistribute binaries without source, while BSD does, so BSD is desirable where obscurity is an element of depth in defense (eg Sony's playstation OSs, Intel ME, etc), or where you simply don't want to redistribute your derivative code (MacOS X, etc). GPL also does not allow you to link GPL-incompatible code (either proprietary or non-compatible open-source licenses) that you don't own and can't relicense to GPL compatible, as that inherently locks off a significant amount of code that you might potentially need (what if you are licensing an audio decoder from a well-known German standards institute?). It simply is much easier for developers to work with with BSD license, as it does not attempt to be "viral" like copyleft code. Here is the code, don't sue the authors, end of story. Frankly it's somewhat impressive that GPL has done as well as it has, the necessity to only link with GPL-compatible code has become a pain point but the kernel project has enough clout to get people to license patches however the project wants (see: ZFS and the kernel devs trolling by relicensing files out from under them). GPL is actually an enormous pain from a licensing and corporate IP perspective and BSD avoids that.