I am not so sure it is accidental. Many people prefer BSD, MIT, or Apache style licenses. There is open debate which is more or less free ( them or GPL ). In p

I am not so sure it is accidental. Many people prefer BSD, MIT, or Apache style licenses. There is open debate which is more or less free ( them or GPL ). In practice, when the Open Source distribution is the dominant implementation, the source tends to be available and modifiable even when the source is from a for profit company. One might look at all the .NET stuff from Microsoft as an example. Clang and LLVM would be other great examples. For the BSD license, the operating system family it was designed for has been available as Open Source since before the GPL has existed. You can still get their equivalent of the core utils in source form today. In fact, there is a Linux distribution going Alpha very soon ( Chimera ) that is going to use them. If most distributions were to adopt Uutils ( this Rust reimplementation ), I fully expect that not only would the source remain available for them but that there would remain essentially a single version that they would all share. I do not think that the GPL is require to maintain that momentum. The big difference is that some commercial company could take this and extend it as their own as you say. In that case though, they would likely just have gone their own way anyway which would mean less sharing, not more. You could argue that MacOS for example is what is wrong with BSD as they took some BSD stuff and have not shared everything back. They have shared some stuff though, likely more than if there was no BSD code to borrow. With the BSD code, it seems very unlikely that MacOS would have used GPL. Anyway, it is all just opinions and preferences. I may not be any more right than you. Who knows? What you are saying though is not 100% obviously right to me either.