zlacker

A project which is intended to be a learning experience in building a Unix variant (in this case, Linux) is a kinda right place for sticking to the Unix philosophy and design, for illustrative purposes.

Mr Pike has indeed constructed a better OS than Unix; too bad AT&T neither knew how to achieve viral popularity, nor why Free Software (as in GPL) is going to dominate the world. By about 1995, it was already too late. (Something similar happened to Inferno vs Java.)

Still, the Unix principles of modularity, composability, doing one thing well, and unified interfaces are widely considered very sane, and adopted.

>>nine_k+(OP)
Not as much as people in Linux community think, especially those that never used commercial UNIX offerings.

GPL is on its way out, a good example is that all Linux competitors in the embedded space, including Linux Foundation's Zephyr, none of them has adopted GPL.

GPL based software is now a minority, almost everything uses licenses that businesses rather reach for.

>>pjmlp+t3
I suspect that GPL2 was instrumental in guaranteeing that the work sacrificed into the common pot of Linux kernel is not going to be taken by a competitor when it's still unpolished, closed, and used to achieve market domination.

FreeBSD came before Linux (as 386BSD), and is also active used by the industry. How much code did Sony or Raytheon shared back to FreeBSD? (LLVM is not FreeBSD proper.)

>>nine_k+pf
See Android for how much that is working in practice, outside the kernel.

Or the Linux distros used by NVidia.

>>pjmlp+t3
I will be honest mentioning Zephyr in a situation when talking about how outdated the Unix design philosophy is, is a bit funny to me since Zephyr (like ecos kinda did once) tries to be Posix-like in its APIs (but ends up not really improving things over the other embedded OSes TBH).

>>theICE+VB
I am talking about Zephyr in the context of GPL, nothing else.

>>pjmlp+t3
I find Zephyr to be a somewhat poor example. It's typically used on MMUless microcontrollers where the application is linked into the same binary as the OS. I'm sure you'll point out that it's not strictly necessary to use it in that manner, but that's how most people use it and that's how they expect it to work. Licensing it as GPL would mean that basically nobody would use it because it would require releasing your entire firmware source code, especially when there's other permissively licensed alternatives in that space like RTEMS, ThreadX, and FreeRTOS.

>>ndiddy+q71
Exactly, there are no other FOSS kernels using GPL nowadays, the Linux kernel was the first and last one with commercial success.