With a recent change that removed dialog in favor of bsddialog, FreeBSD has now retired the last piece of GPL-licensed code in its base system. Although the impact of this change will be minor for …
The major companies that use it, contribute back to it (think Netflix, Sony, Apple, etc). If they didn’t have a copyleft option, Sony and Apple would’ve built completely closed-source and wouldn’t be contributing to anything. Netflix is different in that GPL wouldn’t force them to disclose their modifications, they just preferred FreeBSD because of its networking stack, they would’ve probably just gone with Linux if FreeBSD didn’t exist.
It’s a mixed bag.
The major companies that use it, contribute back to it (think Netflix, Sony, Apple, etc). If they didn’t have a copyleft option, Sony and Apple would’ve built completely closed-source and wouldn’t be contributing to anything. Netflix is different in that GPL wouldn’t force them to disclose their modifications, they just preferred FreeBSD because of its networking stack, they would’ve probably just gone with Linux if FreeBSD didn’t exist.