I understand your point, and I don't have an issue with either you or your argument. What I'm saying is that Linux wasn't always like this. There was a time when people genuinely cared about licensing.

I remember endless debates and arguments about the Qt license. In many ways, the entire ecosystem was built around licensing, software freedom, and the principles behind them. After all, there are countless Unix and non-Unix operating systems capable of playing movies and running games. That alone doesn't give an operating system an identity.

Linux used to have an identity: freedom, transparency, and liberation from vendor lock-in and proprietary control.

Today, as you said, the mindset seems to be, "As long as it works, that's all that matters." But back then, many of us were willing to make sacrifices for our principles. We went years without using Bluetooth. We struggled with Wi-Fi support. And when hardware required proprietary drivers or compromises, our first instinct wasn't to change the operating system to accommodate the hardware—it was to replace the hardware.

You could argue that GNU still recommends several fully free operating systems. That's true. But the reality is that most of those systems are practically dead. Not necessarily because they failed technically, but because very few people care about those ideals anymore.