I’m not particularly militant about Linux distros, but Alpine is one distro I disapprove of in particular. The reason is that it isn’t GNU/Linux – it strips out (copyleft) GNU libc and coreutils and replaces them with permissively-licensed alternatives. I think that (whether intentional or not) it caters too much to corporate interests that exploit “open source” without truly respecting the users’ freedom, and therefore its popularity is potentially harmful to the Free Software movement in the long run.
Considered in and of themselves, permissive licenses are “fine.” They confer all four of the freedoms the FSF lists here, so there’s nothing wrong with them from the perspective of the person receiving the code as an end-user.
The problem is that, unlike copyleft, they fail to bind that recipient to the same conditions and guarantee those freedoms will be maintained for all downstream users who receive the code in the future. They are thus exploitable by those who would take without giving back in return. This makes permissively-licensed code popular with the exploiters, but is bad for the users in the long run.
See, for example, MacOS and iOS: in theory, they’re just BSDs with fancy proprietary UIs, but in practice they can be made so locked-down and user-hostile there’s an entire movement devoted to creating new laws to force Apple to stop bricking people’s property because they needed to replace a bad hardware component. Those four freedoms I referenced earlier are definitely no longer being upheld by Apple, even though Apple itself benefited from them to make the software in the first place.
There’s a reason why copyleft-licensed Linux is so much more popular than permissively-licensed BSD, and resistance to selfish bad actors (even as flawed as it is, what with the “tivoization” exploit of the GPLv2 and all) fragmenting the community with proprietary features is undoubtedly part of it.
What new OS* have you tried this year?
*or distribution...