Licenses should be evaluated in context.
1. For anything internal, they already had free work from GPL. They can even modify it - the for them unfortunate side-effects only apply if they need to distribute it to outsiders, as only those receiving a copy need access to the source.
2. For anything external in this particular example, they can either use GPL projects unmodified (no effort required on their part in that case), or they could get all these bits from BSD with a BSD license already and do whatever they want.
GPL - and more importantly, AGPL - is definitely important for full-fledged products that can be monetized and abused, with improvements never made available. Note that no common license require any degree of upstream collaboration.
coreutils on the other hand isn't such a full product. This project hardly enables anything new - they could just use a BSD userspace or other portable coreutils clone - but if I end up exposed to some included coreutils in a proprietary product, I'd much rather have that they could easily include a proper one. The same logic applies to many other things too.
1. For anything internal, they already had free work from GPL. They can even modify it - the for them unfortunate side-effects only apply if they need to distribute it to outsiders, as only those receiving a copy need access to the source.
2. For anything external in this particular example, they can either use GPL projects unmodified (no effort required on their part in that case), or they could get all these bits from BSD with a BSD license already and do whatever they want.
GPL - and more importantly, AGPL - is definitely important for full-fledged products that can be monetized and abused, with improvements never made available. Note that no common license require any degree of upstream collaboration.
coreutils on the other hand isn't such a full product. This project hardly enables anything new - they could just use a BSD userspace or other portable coreutils clone - but if I end up exposed to some included coreutils in a proprietary product, I'd much rather have that they could easily include a proper one. The same logic applies to many other things too.