There are, broadly, two types of FOSS licenses when it relates to commercial usa

Question

There are, broadly, two types of FOSS licenses when it relates to commercial usage of the code - let's say the GPL-type and the BSD-type. The first is, broadly, restrictive about commercial usage (by usage I also mean modification and redistribution, as well as creating derived works, etc.) of the code under the license, and the second is much more permissive.

As I understand, the idea behind GPL-type licenses is to encourage people to abandon the proprietary software model and instead convert to the FOSS code, and the license is the instrument to entice them to do so - i.e. "you can use this nice software, but only if you agree to come to our camp and play by our rules".

What I want to ask is - was this strategy successful so far? I.e. are there any major achievements in the form of some big project going from closed to open because of GPL or some software being developed in the open only because GPL made it so? How big is the impact of this strategy - compared, say, to the world where everybody would have BSD-type licenses or release all open-source code under public domain?

Note that I am not asking if FOSS model is successful - this is beyond question. What I am asking is if the specific way of enticing people to convert from proprietary to FOSS used by GPL-type and not used by BSD-type licenses was successful. I also don't ask about the merits of GPL itself as the license - just about the fact of its effectiveness.

Explanation / Answer

First, there is an inherent subjectivity in the question - there is no way to know for sure, and history can be interpreted either way. This is an old debate, and one of the core issue in the debate open source vs free software. You also need to define what you mean by reaching its goals. It is difficult to argue that GPL and the FSF has not contributed to make open source a significant movement of the last 2-3 decades. It has not reached its goals of all code being free software, though.

The paragon of GPL softwares are of course linux and everything coming from the FSF (gcc, etc...). Interestingly, for linux, the GPL was not chosen for its political stance, but because of the idea of reciprocity, as stated several times by Linus Torvald. I give you my code, but you have to give me yours in exchange if you use mine.

As far as linux itself goes, I think the GPL have been very valuable - a recent example is BTRFS, the new fs developed inside Oracle. The main writer of BTRFS has stated that the only reason Oracle agreed in the first place to use GPL is because it did not have a choice. The bigger question is whether linux itself became successful because or despite the GPL. Various factors such as Linus incredible leadership, copyright issues for the *BSD project at that time, etc... make the hypothesis impossible to prove/disprove.

For gcc, Stallman has written several times why the GPL saved the project against "propietarization".

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