Comment by surajrmal
6 hours ago
This feels eerily close to having someone try to convince me to be join their religion. You don't need to force your opinions into others. Let them choose. If folks agree then the license will hold them back in terms of building a community. There are plenty of great open source kernels that don't use GPL, including freebsd. I think most embedded os kernels are not gpl (zephyr, freertos, etc). I would argue that Linux does well in spite of its license not because of it.
Just as people who strongly prefer permissive licenses deny copyleft licenses, this is the same in reverse. If you don't want to touch GPL projects, then don't.
Im not trying to suggest non gpl licenses are superior and folks writing kernels with gpl are making a mistake. On the contrary I'm advocating that both are fine options and you shouldn't make people feel bad for choosing to not use gpl. There is a difference here and it matters greatly. Most people will not care for the differences between the two and the ones that do will choose the one that aligns with their values. If I'm even a hint of anti gpl, it's due to zealotry of it's supporters.
I think a lot of the backlash for the GPL is unreasonable, and not really better than a lot of the backlash for permissive licenses, and furthermore I believe there are reasonable ideological opinions to prefer one or the other (though ideology isn't an excuse to be mean). But I concede that the person you responded to set a poor standard of discussion.