Must be, but I swear under penalty of perjury and a one year sentence of using OS/2 that it's an accurate description of what I've seen.
There are worse fates...
"You seem to find it distasteful and anti-intellectual when people choose the GPL license, because you ascribe the choice to religion."
Preposterous generalization!!
It was you who said
"it became something even religious". Unless you meant your own statement was preposterous generalization, I don't see what you are objecting to.
I am talking about a user deciding wether to use a piece of software depending on its open source license and regardless of its merits. These people I am talking about (and in the late 90's it was quite frequent or I am a magnet for weirdos!) would choose Internet Information Server over NGINX if the former had a GPL license and the latter BSD or any other open source license.
At that time -- up to mid nineties -- everything BSD was overshadowed by the
USL vs BSDi lawsuit. In the late nineties, the exact status of the BSD sources was still debated, because the lawsuit was settled out of court, and the implications were unclear to those outside Novell and Berkeley University.
On the other hand, GPL had been successfully used by the GNU Project for a decade, with a very political figurehead,
RMS, making it extremely clear as to what the underlying goals are, willing to speak about it to anyone who wanted to listen (or didn't get out of earshot fast enough).
A user can choose a software package based on different criteria, one of them the license.
Funny thing is, to a non-developer end user, all the free software/open source licenses provide the same freedoms -- which aside from distribution (of the original software or its derivative), boils down to
"do whatever the heck you want with it".
Doubly irrational because the choice of an open source license is a bit irrelevant if you are only intending to use something.
That I can fully agree with.
I do try to explain all this to anyone I discuss licenses with, by the way. It could be that because I myself have such a simple criteria of choosing a license, and have advised quite a few others along the same lines, I have somewhat of an echo chamber effect in my "circles".
I am not sure the license is so relevant. If I am not wrong Linux was released at an especially critical time: when BSD was hampered by legal disputes and, at the same time computers powerful enough to run a Unix like operating system comfortably were becoming mainstream.
I think the license was very relevant for exactly that same reason. The GNU Project had very clear goals, and at that time, one could easily view them as "protecting" against
Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategies (of creating incompatible closed-source derivatives, in order to exclude competitive solutions). Although Linus Torvalds didn't think much about the license when he chose one for the Linux kernel, using the GNU tools to compile and build it made the choice easy, I understand.
Although I studied at the same University as Linus Torvalds, I didn't install Linux myself until 1996, if I recall correctly. I do recall that I did install first two Linux production servers (a mail server and a combined Netware (mars) / AppleTalk (netatalk) file server) in 1998 for a department in another University. (I ended up maintaining a streamlined distribution based on
LFS for quite a few years for those.) I also ran a company at the same time, and had an actual lawyer go through the typical licenses, and explain their requirements and other implications to me.