A mess of lawsuits, withdrawn devices and shut down code repos most likely.

And no users.

Everywhere I've worked since the mid 90s, internal and external license compliancy enforcer-types have always left me and my stuff alone when I print out the DFSG and a couple of the DFSG compliant licenses, show them we run Debian, and at work only use Main not Non-Free. I've never had a "license compliancy audit" run longer than 30 minutes or so and maybe two dozen pieces of paper. Usually much less.

Its a measurable financial advantage of free software. You should see the labor and expense nightmare my proprietary coworkers have gone thru to "prove" they have the right to a copy of windows and office and other stuff. Its very expensive to use proprietary software legally at a business, and I'm not just talking about purchase price!

If I could no longer use free software because there no longer is any, I'd have to switch to something involving less legal risk. Unfortunately probably MS products, apple being a bit too rich for their blood. It would be a nightmare conversion, and a much higher TCO leading to longer term financial issues.

i didn't necessarily mean for practical use, i just meant, what sort of finished (hah) product could come out at the end!

We might have better interop with proprietary software. Maybe. It's possible that the BSDs would have more hardware support as they could just borrow it from Linux.

Companies would probably keep an even tighter guard on their code. They may stop contributing to FOSS completely without the protection of the GPL.

We'd probably find all sorts of weird binaries being thrown around the place, as seems to happen in the android scene, where people just splice stuff together without considering any of this stuff. Support and consistency would be a nightmare. People would be less able to build on each others work as there would be no necessity for anyone to publish anything if they didn't want to or couldn't be bothered.

I don't think it would be any sort of utopia.

Lawsuits aside... I guess a bunch of illegal-but-everyone-uses-them binary blobs of highly varying quality with some sources floating around.

Oh, we had that, that was called "pirated [Stallman forgive me] Windows". I believe I had leaked W2K sources burned on some old CD, if they're still readable...