@DrPizza said:
With BSD software, there is much less of an impetus to put enhacements back into the codebase, so it matures slower.I see no evidence for this in practice.
The BSD license is fundamentally honest; the GPL is fundamentally dishonest. The BSD license ensures freedom. The GPL denies it.
That's simply silly. There is nothing fundamentally dishonest about the GPL. It is a licensing agreement between someone a provider and a consumer of software. That's all. If you don't like its terms, you're not forced to agree to it. If you want to take someone else's work and extend it for a client project, fine. Just give the client the source.
Hell, you don't even need to pass on your source modifications if they're for your internal use only. The only "restriction" the GPL is imposing on you is not closing the source once it's been opened, which is, duh, sort of the whole point.
As to the relative growth in the Linux community as compared to the BSD community: there are a lot of reasons for that, not the least of which was the pall over the *NIX community cast by the AT&T lawsuit. A bit more on that here: http://www.freebsddiary.org/linux.php.