zlacker

I recently heard the argument that the license-friction of copyleft sometimes is actually a good thing. Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)...

>>miclil+(OP)
I'd be really interested in hearing more about that argument.

I can take a guess with respect to Linux: that's the kind of software where forcing companies to submit code back to it is enormously beneficial due to the need for an operating system to have drivers for vast ranges of different hardware.

>>miclil+(OP)
Keep in mind that Linux doesn’t use the GPL3 and stuck with the GPL2 since the maintainers and Linus Torvalds thought that it was overly restrictive [1]. So at some point the license friction becomes too large to be practical for organizations to use or contribute to.

[1] https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU

>>miclil+(OP)
> Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)

I don't think there is any citation needed. Linux powers all the cloud providers, 80% of the mobile market, a ton of random devices. At this point Linux is the most important OS on the planet, ahead of Windows and Apple OSes. It's just not as visible.

>>simonw+M
Yeah. Also things like filesystems. More generally, the history of BSD is full of proprietary forks that never got merged back in: Ultrix, SunOS, BSDI's BSD/386 (later BSD/OS), Winsock, and the Wollongong TCP/IP stack on UNICOS and, I think, also on VMS. The most famous fork is macOS Darwin, which I think is still in fact open source, but it's been many years since I saw someone successfully running the open-source Darwin.

Also, though, GCC got Objective-C support, and still has it, because the FSF told NeXT it would violate the GPL for them to attempt to make Objective-C a proprietary add-on to the GCC compiler, even if it wasn't literally linked with it. And a lot of GCC backends probably would have been kept proprietary by one or another hardware company if the license had allowed it.

>>simonw+M
How does Windows without such force to contribute code back have better drivers?

>>eviks+zz1
I imagine because the Windows team at Microsoft have an annual budget measured in billions of dollars.