I call BS. GPL just happened to have the GNU stack with it. If the same toolchain (gcc, etc) were released as BSD/MIT from the beginning, it would have been just as well or better.
The accident was that the plan was conceived by Stallman and involved GNU/GPL.
What I'm saying is a similar plan with BSD/MIT licenses, if it was initiated by another guy first, would be just as good.
In other words that the reason GNU/OSS got that far was that they provided software people needed at the right time -- not because they were GPL as opposed to BSD licensd.
Was makes you so sure that it would matter? The original software will still be there and free for any modification one would want to do.
[1] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/infographics/who-w...
Apple famously doesn't provide any "recent" GNU tools because they're GPL3+ licensed, when they were previously GPL2.x and less restrictive.
Maybe, as a data point: how many of the manufacturers' contributions to Linux are MIT licensed, so that they can be picked up by *BSD as well?
i'm guessing you think that's just "incidental"... but that's a very strange argument to ever make if you think anything has any explanatory power at all.
BSD/MIT is not "kind of free". It's freer (more people can do more things) than the GPL.
i'm not going to argue about that though. surely you're familiar with the territory.
the point, though, is that the GNU ethos is the reason for the GNU tools, and the onus would be on you to show that that ethos was interchangeable with some other in order to get where we are today.
when you're explaining an event in history, you need to take the facts and look for "why did things happen this way after that particular event?" you can't just substitute a comparable event and say "everything would be the same." if we're talking about the legal basis of this or that for the GPL and BSD licenses, sure, you can interchange things and show that "here, in this case, you'd be regretting GPL, and in this case [etc etc etc]." but for the course of history, you actually have to be much more careful with your scope... it's unlikely that one change (one that the primary person involved, RMS, himself took to be the central point of all it) could have no effects, or no salient ones.
notice how these points are distinct. RMS wouldn't but have written the GPL. history worked out how it did. these are different than your or my opinions on the merits of varying degrees of permissiveness in licenses.
That depends on your goals and definitions, of course. The goal of the GPL is to ensure freedom of the code, by placing demands on the distributor. The BSD license does not do this, so a developer is "more free" with BSD-licensed code. However, the code is "more free" when it's GPL-licensed.
Which you prefer is a personal choice, but it's kinda pointless to argue which one is "more free" as the licenses have different interpretations of freedom.