Not sure why am getting in the middle of this but I need to point out that you are not even correct for Linux.

Linux rather famously has avoided the GPL3 and is distributed under a modified GPL2. This license allows binary blob modules. We are all very familiar with this.

As a result, the kernel that matches your description above that ships in the highest volume is Linux by a massive margin. Can you run a fully open source Linux kernel on your Android phone? Probably not. You do not have the drivers. You may not pass the security checks.

Do companies like Broadcomm “collaborate” on Linux even in the PC or Mac space? Not really.

On the other side, companies that use FreeBSD do actually contribute a lot of code. This includes Netflix most famously but even Sony gives back.

The vast majority of vendors that use Linux embedded never contribute a single line of code (like 80% or more at least - maybe 98%). Very few of them even make the kernel code they use available. I worked in video surveillance where every video recorder and camera in the entire industry is Linux based at this point. Almost none of them distribute source code.

But even the story behind the GPL or not is wrong in the real world.

You get great industry players like Valve that contribute a lot of code. And guess what, a lot of that code is licensed permissively. And a lot of other companies continue to Mesa, Wayland, Xorg, pipewire, and other parts of the stack that are permissively licensed. The level of contribution has nothing to do with the GPL.

How about other important projects? There are more big companies contributing to LLVM/Clang (permissive) than there are to GCC (GPL).

In fact, the GPL often discourages collaboration. Apple is a great example of a company that will not contribute to even the GPL projects that they rely on. But they do contribute a fair bit of Open Source code permisssively. And they are not even one of the “good guys” in Open Source.

This comment is pure ideological mythology.