There is an increase of posts with casual confidence in their own absolute correctnes. I originally attributed it to the influence of llms, but it is becoming so common now it is hard to dismiss.
I just mean that GPL is a bit of a religion. There are very strong opinions and principles behind it. Whereas the BSD license is more like "do whatever you want". It makes sense that the followers of the former care more deeply about it, right?
Personally I don't care about or obey any software licenses, as a user.
But this is kinda the vibe I get from other BSD users if a license discussion comes up. Maybe it's my bubble, that's possible.
I have to strongly disagree with you that GPL is a religion. While there Are certainly people who sound religious in nature when they talk about the GPL, The real reason it is important is because of what it forces developers to do on behalf of the users. It balances somewhat the power between the developer and the user.
Under other licensing, developers wield an extraordinary amount of power over the users. Yes, The user could opt not to run that code, but realistically that isn't an option in the modern day. Developers can and will abuse their access to your machine to serve their ends regardless of whether it adds value to you or not. For example, how much data collection is in nearly all modern software?
Perhaps you would argue that what I've said above only applies to a very tiny minority of users who have the technical skills to actually utilize the code, and everyone else It's just a religious argument. I don't fully disagree with that. There is another clear benefit That even those untechnical users received from the GPL, and that is the essentially forced contribution back from companies who want to build on top of it. I don't think there's any better example than the Linux kernel, which has gotten lots of contributions from companies that are otherwise very proprietary in nature and would never have open sourced things. This has benefited everyone and has acted as a rising tide lifting All boats. Without the requirements in the GPL, this most certainly would not happen.
My response to it however, is that those users still get a good amount of protection because The code is out there
Oops that last sentence (which is a sentence fragment) was supposed to be deleted, but slipped in some how and it's too late to edit. The point I was going to make was just that with the code being out there, the odds that some offensive thing the devs might do can be discovered by someone and have the issue raised. It also provides a powerful incentive to not stick something gross in there for risk of it being discovered and getting called out for it :-)
I get what you mean and probably there are people like that, but I consider it mostly an exaggeration.
Simply - the GPL has some clauses enforcing some obligations (to prevent some rights from being taken away from you, the end user - according to their wording, and I agree), these and other clauses make it legally incompatible with the inclusion of ZFS (CDDL license) in the Linux kernel (GPL). You can build it yourself (so indeed as a user you get to not care or obey) but not distribute it (this is the problem of your distribution's maintainer).
Canonical's lawyers think this is not a problem if the ZFS code is distributed as a module, instead of compiled into the kernel itself, and since 2016 Ubuntu shipped with ZFS support.
The BSD license is considered perfectly compatible with the inclusion of CDDL licensed code and therefore many BSD distros ship with ZFS (and Dtrace) out of the box without legal worries. Indeed Oracle hasn't come knocking.
TL;DR: it's not a vibe. Some licenses are compatible with each other, some aren't. It also depends on how different licenses come into play into a "finished product" (e.g. kernel module vs monolithic build)
What a weird take. BSD's license is compatible with ZFS, that's why. "Don't really care?" Really? Come on.