Although I'd be more than happy with other OSes/distributions defaulting to GPL.
Yes, but if the goal is to reuse existing code that already exists in Linux then there's no reason to expect it to be under a permissive license. Some of it actually already is if I recall correctly, but you shouldn't expect that.
> Although I'd be more than happy with other OSes/distributions defaulting to GPL.
Illumos isn't GPL and and in the legal views of many people can't be compatible with it; CDDL/GPL (in)compatibility is a very long running issue, usually in the other direction with CDDL ZFS drivers in the GPL Linux kernel. (IANAL; I'm not asserting specifically that it is or is not actually compatible, just that a lot of people consider it to be incompatible)