That open source has been disruptive I consider indisputable. The question then becomes, "Were the BSDs poised to lead the way to the current world of commoditi

That open source has been disruptive I consider indisputable. The question then becomes, "Were the BSDs poised to lead the way to the current world of commoditized software infrastructure?" But that's a different question. Speaking only in terms of operating systems, the AT&T lawsuit caused the BSD derivatives to stumble just as they started, and at the same time Linux was beginning to enter its stride. The GPL/FSF didn't (through dogma or community forces) drive this, but rather, circumstances and a general hobbiest interest in open source operating system development. Whether by dogma or community forces, something about the FSF and the GPL transformed open source from a licensing scheme to a movement that produced the mass of software that we have today. Whether or not the BSDs could have done that is a separate question -- they in fact did not, and the massive disruption that we've seen has been an outgrowth of GPLed projects. That's vastly overstating the reach of the GPL projects. Everything from Apache HTTPD to PHP to Perl was (and is) liberally licensed.