Comment by brobdingnagians

That's kind of the point though. BSD is truly free, and that means there are a lot of proprietary products which benefit massively from it and create worthwhile products with clear monetization strategies and thrive. Sure, they might not contribute back, but the point of the open source was often to share code to improve the state of the art and provide useful code for people so they don't have to start from scratch. Apple took BSD licensed code to make macOS, and it helped them, they contribute some OS code to Darwin, but there are probably lots of happy mac users who benefit immensely from that BSD code. There are lots of people who do BSD code and improve it, just as there are GPL people. Popularity is not always [i.e. almost never] a measure of correctness, principle, or goodness. I like BSD, because any code I release, I hope it helps someone somewhere to do something useful for the world [even when proprietary], and if it does, then great.