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1. Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Monday, 19-Dec-2022 02:51:07 JST Charles U. Farley

   GPL is the reason Linux won out over the BSDs. The ONLY reason.

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Monday, 19-Dec-2022 02:51:06 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     @freakazoid It'd be interesting to hear you justify this statement?

   • Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Monday, 19-Dec-2022 03:05:58 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     • Adrian Cochrane

     @alcinnz Companies that use Linux are forced to contribute back, while companies like Apple that use BSD code don't.

     As a result, BSD sees a whole bunch of commercial use, but that hasn't resulted in greater non-commercial use. The end result was that Linux ended up so far ahead in the long term that companies have started switching from BSD derivatives to Linux despite the additional hurdle of having to contribute back any improvements they make.

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Monday, 19-Dec-2022 03:09:13 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     • Adrian Cochrane

     @alcinnz One could argue that it's because of Google, but had Google chosen a BSD instead of Linux, even if they did choose to contribute back in the short term, it seems very likely they would have eventually stopped based on their choice to prohibit GPL in userspace on Android, and the fact that they now have a fully non-GPL OS of their own.

     LLVM vs GCC might be a good counter-argument. But there was no LGPL third option. And one wonders how things might have gone if the Language Server Protocol had existed when they decided to go with LLVM.

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Monday, 19-Dec-2022 03:10:37 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     • Adrian Cochrane

     @alcinnz One can also argue that LLVM and GCC aren't really comparable projects. LLVM was explicitly designed as a modular compiler framework that would be easy to embed and extend, while GCC is far less modular.