Sure, users shouldn't care. The ecosystems ought to serve the users after all, and it should be sustainable, competitive with other ecosystems, etc. But all the

Sure, users shouldn't care. The ecosystems ought to serve the users after all, and it should be sustainable, competitive with other ecosystems, etc. But all these instrumental goals are on the developers, and if carefully choosing licenses for each project can help with this, then it makes sense to pay attention to which project has which license. Coreutils? Probably here the importance is to provide the interface the users want. And provide it everywhere thus allowing the ecosystem to grow and be able to move to other platforms even. This might require a BSD-like license. (These tools evolve slowly, and usually doesn't represent some huge know-how that other ecosystems want to lift, here the well-known efficient CLI experience is the value, which might be fair-use copyable, but as we see - for example Apple - doesn't care, and thus basically users are left with worse defaults.) Filesystems? Stability, cross-platform compatibility, but also usually decades of extremely valuable battle-testing culminates in a specific codebase+ecosystem context. It's hard to replicate with simple copying, but of course much easier. In practice with ZFS we see that the licensing incompatibility serves to provide fewer options for users. Drivers? Databases? Kernel? Where does the TiVo problem rears its ugly head? And what does the relative lackluster GPL enforcement track record tells us here? What about the more important problem with non-upstreamed but-shitty-as-fuck Android drivers? Are they good or bad for users? Which ecosystem are they a part of? So, it seems, that even if one cares about licenses the big takeaway is that they matter a lot less than the other things required for a successful source-sharing community-driven project. OSI approved or nor. (For example I have no idea what license Terraform has .. okay, I checked, it's MariaDB BSL, and OpenTF is now MPL2. So I don't think MIT/Apache2 or AGPL3 would have made a difference in Hashicorp's hostile stewardship.)