As I said--it depends on the purpose of the software. If you're gonna sell your product and that product uses GPL software, then yes--it would be a liability. BSD would be a better choice.
If, however, you are using it in-house, and would like "free" development, and think the software would be useful to others, then the GPL would be good, because any development that others do would get back to you.
Again--it depends on the situation.
Well, in the case of “free development” we had some downsides from that as well.
Many of the GPL/OSF developers “in the wild” have no idea what it means to work “in the large” — ie, on millions of lines of code, with thousands of engineers.
We’d put changes into some of the development s/w we used and kick the changes out. Our changes had very definite purposes - supporting development “in the large.”
The “free development” we got in return was all too often our changes pulled out, or modified to a point where they were useless - because the ideologically pure developers on the outside knew oh-so-much better than us what was going on.
After awhile, we decided that we’d opt out of the “free” software movement and just contract with Cygnus to do our changes to tools and let them deal with the GPL/FSF/OSF mobs. We had contracts that feature X would be supported. We no longer cared how that happened - just that it did.
The next problem down my list of issues with the GPL/FSF crowd is this: while they’re often very talented in isolation, they most often don’t get along well with others, if at all. This is why there are so many forks in the Linux/GPL “movement” - these guys have the social graces of a barrel full of constipated and pissed-off badgers. They’re all so rigidly attached to their ideologies that they’re going to take their ideas and fork off from the group, which just distracts from a core mission.
Well, in the corporate world, almost nothing big and profitable is accomplished by lone wolves any more, and this is why much of their output is increasingly of little use.
In the BSD world, there isn’t the same tendency to playing the “screw you guys, I’m going home” games. FreeBSD, rather than have a mob of the masses and two high priests at the top, has a meritocracy where the work is spread out along functional lines, and those senior people in their particular functional area are gatekeepers. People have to get along more/better in the BSD model.
And it shows in the end result.
I’m not saying that nothing useful comes out of Linux - they certainly do some important and useful work, but in my experience, the Linux/GPL movement has created some big downsides for themselves.