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> there are enough permissively licensed and proprietary COTS operating systems
In this case, sure; there are non-GPL OSs, but if there were not, then they'd have to ship the code to the IME or leave features out of it. It's an example, the point is that open source is exploited by malicious actors and GPL/AGPL help prevent this from occurring.
> you're not going to materially impact the situation in a real way just by licensing your own code permissively
Sure, individual efforts are individual efforts, but a group of any size is individuals. Even if behavior only mattered in aggregate, aggregate behavior is the behavior of a large number of individuals. In the case of software, because the nature of computers and networks is to multiply individual efforts, it's not the same thing: Linux was kicked off by one guy, the GNU project was started by one guy, things would be very different if neither of those guys existed, things would have been very different if Linux had adopted the same license as BSD. But if you consider the case of a boycott, enough individuals have to decide to stick with the boycott for it to matter: if you want a boycott to succeed, "My individual efforts don't matter, just skip the boycott" leads to an ineffectual boycott.
Almost all the fedi code is AGPL, so Facebook had to spend time and money on writing their own ActivityPub server, and their efforts flopped. (In part because it was a shot at Twitter rather than a real effort.) Fedi is, in general, unattractive to that kind of entity because of the openness.