With permissive licenses you often run into the following situation:
You buy something physical from a company, say a humanoid unitree robot, a robot actuator or Arm SBC. These pieces of hardware come with their own proprietary SDK that they sell for a significant fee or a proprietary GPU driver without any hope of updates. The SDK heavily uses MIT licensed code and there is no possibility of modifying or inspecting the code for debugging.
From the perspective of the user, the system might as well be 100% proprietary and his freedoms are maximally restricted. You could say that this is fine since it doesn't detract from the original open source project, but you have to remember that these companies would ordinarily have to pay significant development fees to build the same level of functionality and they have no obligation to help or support your project financially. You as the open source developer will then have to beg them to hire you, so you can do paid work that is unrelated to the original project to finally work on your project in your spare time, purely because it is possible to charge for hardware but not the software that the hardware depends on.
What I'm trying to get at here is that this means full vertical integration is the only way. The problem is that most hardware companies are hardware companies first and they don't care about software. They concentrate on making hardware, because each sale brings in money. They don't spend money on software, because it appears to be optional. You can just tell the customer or an open source community to bring their own software. The money that is needed to pay for open source projects flows through the very companies that refuse to spend money on software.
If you want to write open source software, you must be a hardware company so you are customer facing and have access to customer money that can be diverted to the development of the software.
You buy something physical from a company, say a humanoid unitree robot, a robot actuator or Arm SBC. These pieces of hardware come with their own proprietary SDK that they sell for a significant fee or a proprietary GPU driver without any hope of updates. The SDK heavily uses MIT licensed code and there is no possibility of modifying or inspecting the code for debugging.
From the perspective of the user, the system might as well be 100% proprietary and his freedoms are maximally restricted. You could say that this is fine since it doesn't detract from the original open source project, but you have to remember that these companies would ordinarily have to pay significant development fees to build the same level of functionality and they have no obligation to help or support your project financially. You as the open source developer will then have to beg them to hire you, so you can do paid work that is unrelated to the original project to finally work on your project in your spare time, purely because it is possible to charge for hardware but not the software that the hardware depends on.
What I'm trying to get at here is that this means full vertical integration is the only way. The problem is that most hardware companies are hardware companies first and they don't care about software. They concentrate on making hardware, because each sale brings in money. They don't spend money on software, because it appears to be optional. You can just tell the customer or an open source community to bring their own software. The money that is needed to pay for open source projects flows through the very companies that refuse to spend money on software.
If you want to write open source software, you must be a hardware company so you are customer facing and have access to customer money that can be diverted to the development of the software.