This is based largely on an essay from 18 to 20 years ago.[1]
The claim that GPL benefits large companies that want to maintain monopolistic market power is not supported by several developments in the years up till today. Intel’s stealth computer that runs inside of yours called the Intel Management Engine is running Minix, a non-GPL OS. Apple’s macOS/iOS/iPadOS is non-GPL. Sun’s Solaris was open sourced under CDDL, not GPL. Microsoft’s VS Code is not under GPL either.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080201042548/http://alumni.cse...
> Sun’s Solaris was open sourced under CDDL, not GPL.
CDDL is a similarly copyleft license, though.
That is true. But it is weaker than GPL in that it permits mixing CDDL code with non-CDDL code.
The argument that the essay appears to be making is that large companies want to establish themselves as monopolies by requiring that competing forks publish their changes, incorporating the good changes, and outgunning them on overall development effort. My reading is that the CDDL would not force forks to publish the source code for changes that are made to non-CDDL source files.
The backstory of the CDDL is that Solaris used some code written by contractors over the decades, and Sun didn't have the rights to relicense them and didn't want to spend the effort rewriting all of it either. Since then, illumos has rewritten all those components.
It was a pragmatic and useful decision at the time that's become rather frustrating with ugly workarounds of dubious legality ("GPL condom"). I wish Sun had written in a GPL-compatibility clause similar to the copyleft EUPL.
But apparently kept the same license?
>> Most of the existing code is licensed under the CDDL and we expect new code will generally be under this license as well.[0]