It's very cool, but the MIT license on that means it will never fit the niche (mainly ideological) that the Hurd was aiming at.
I actually think GPL is key in long-term adoption and is part of at least the early part of Linux's success. To prevent fragmentation. To coax commercial entities to contribute. And to generally encourage community development, rather than forks (since forks require distributing source anyways).
But others disagree, and these days Apache/MIT type licenses proliferate.
I'm not convinced that the license is the biggest motivator today for vendors getting code to upstream Linux. Look at LLVM - Sony has spent significant effort landing support for PlayStation targets there, the license doesn't require it, but it means they aren't chasing such a moving goalpost with some internal tree.
When they don't get the code upstream, it's usually because they know the code doesn't pass the stringent requirements for upstreaming and don't want to get embarrassed during review.
What you do get in that case is code dumps from those companies so someone interested at the very least does not have to reverse engineer the driver to rewrite it and get it accepted upstream.
I actually think GPL is key in long-term adoption and is part of at least the early part of Linux's success. To prevent fragmentation. To coax commercial entities to contribute. And to generally encourage community development, rather than forks (since forks require distributing source anyways).
But others disagree, and these days Apache/MIT type licenses proliferate.