@tmw I have a few thoughts about this.

Like, for one thing, BSD developers have actively chosen that licence for good (to them) reasons. It’s not as if their code is being taken without their knowledge or permission and commercialised; it’s intended that their code can be used even in proprietary codebases. (One reason I’ve heard is that it’s a good thing if propriety software includes good-quality implementations of critical things.)

And secondly, as you allude to, I don’t know how much copyleft actually protects against the real issues facing us right now. Like even before LLMs — if a codebase was GPL, on the one hand there probably isn’t much you could do to stop Amazon using it; and on the hand they absolutely had the resources to just reimplement a compatible version of something if they wanted. (I think they did so with Elasticsearch maybe?)

(I don’t know that LLMs realistically make reimplementing something easier — they do give the appearance of doing so though, which might be all that’s necessary to cause some damage in the short term.)