&gt; So how exactly has the open source world lost out due to the existence of the BSD license?<p>iOS (based on BSD Unix) is proprietary. Android (based on GPL Linux) is open. iOS came first and seemed to be the huge winner. Then Google took GNU&#x2F;Linux (GPL), built Android around it, and outpaced iOS by far.<p>Now the BSD developers have to pay (!) for their own (!) developments when they buy idevices. They have no option to modify anything. They are just consumers.<p>The Linux developers can take the code, tweak their devices (Cyanogenmod) and do a lot of other things with it. There is Android for x86 for instance.<p>BSD is good for hardware producers. GPL is good for hardware consumers.