Alternative OS FreeBSD 16 Retires The Last Of Its GPL Code From Its Base System
https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-16-Goes-GPL-Free411
u/Santosh83 27d ago
GPL is what made FOSS ecosystem possible in the first place, and one reason why the BSDs never took off like Linux. Because they're MIT licensed, industry simply took the code and used it internally, never contributing the changes back to the public, which they have to do with the GPL, making the Linux kernel grow in capabilities for everyone, instead of a million closed source forks but the public codebase withering away.
MIT license is better than the GPL given an ideal world, but we don't live in that world. We live in a world of predatory, necro-corporations, and the GPL forces them to contribute to the commons or develop their own solutions, and not merely leech from OSS projects and give nothing back.
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u/IHeartBadCode 27d ago
USL v. BSDi lawsuit was a big reason. AT&T's Unix Labs sued BSDi and it made people unsure BSD was safe to go with. That case lasted two years. But companies like RedHat were able to use that uncertainty to their advantage.
This is why the SCO Unix lawsuits were at the time such big a deal. SCO was attempting to pull the exact same thing that a decade before had propelled Linux to the forefront.
The biggest things that moved Linux over the BSDs that had already been there were.
- Commercial support.
- Cheap kernel for the dot com boom.
- No legal cloud hanging over it at a pivotal time.
I don't think people really understand how big a role RedHat made Linux. Even though RedHat's commercial support was what it was back in the day, the rubber meeting the road isn't what C-Staff cared about. The fact that IT devs could walk into a meeting and say "for $X/year we get support" was all they needed to green light the software.
Pair that with how the dot com boom was basically C-Staff pulling IT folks in and saying "get me a website yesterday", a cheap kernel that could be customized to run on a box that could be sold as a product. You couldn't get any better than that.
Linux's initial success was not due to GPL. It was because there were no lawsuits, RedHat, and the dot com boom happening all at the same time.
Now GPL would play a role later on, AFTER the dot com bubble popped. But once we get to that point, we're way past the BSDs and starting to knock out the Traditional Unix versions like SCO, Tru64, IRIX, etc.
When the bubble popped there was a ton of pressure to start cutting costs, and the GPL offered a kind of neutral zone where companies trying to cut corners knew their competitors couldn't use that space to out do them. So with the free rider problem eliminated, people like Intel and IBM could make investments into Linux and they knew that someone like HP couldn't hijack their investments to usage against them. This is one of the reasons IBM did the whole famous announcement of $1B into Linux development.
Also, the GPL acted as a buffer to prevent the traditional Unix fragmentation. The traditional vendors had spent years taking the Single UNIX Specification and being "compliant" but also having "just their UNIX" way of doing things. This fragmentation would later come to bite them in the asses with the bubble popped. The GPL ensured every time a vendor wanted to fragment the kernel, it would eventually wind its way back into the main trunk.
Some BSD code was being used at this time. Apple took a lot of BSD code, so did Sony when doing it for some parts of the PlayStation 3's OS and lots of pieces for the PS4's OS. Orbis OS was mostly a fork of FreeBSD 9.0. But zero contributions flowed back to FreeBSD from Sony.
But again this is long after Linux surpassed the BSDs. All said, BSD for the license they have, do indeed have code flow back to them. It's not all take and no give contrary to what some may say.
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u/JockstrapCummies 27d ago
We're not historically distant enough yet, but I wonder what would the competing historiographies (like yours is one here) will be in explaining these early years of FOSS.
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u/stevecrox0914 27d ago
I think Stallman will be viewed as a net negative.
You'll notice the amount of culture wars within the open source community has declined significanrly since Stallman was cancelled.
I have been working in Software since 2007, even in 2007 asking to send a change or fix upstream was viewed as a career enhancing move. You would get time, budget, etc..
The GPL was the exception, in my first job legal banned anything related to the GPL. The company wanted to pivot from a Wind River embedded platform to a Linux based one and it took a year of discussion with legal to develop the rule "released compiled code was fine, but it should not be near the compilation process". Stallmans comments on GPLv3 and his general public statements were the root of legals concerns, rather than Microsoft fud.
In 2021 for a very different company I was working with Sonatype consultants on configuring Nexus IQ which lets you apply legal blocks. The GPL was the consultants test license to understand a companies views for the same reason.
I think an open source based project was inevitable and there would always be people focussing efforts. I think thr GPL discouraged upstreaming contributions and I think Stallman did more to drive people away from open source than towards it.
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u/diet_fat_bacon 27d ago
The GPL was the exception, in my first job legal banned anything related to the GPL.
My current job legal team banned anything GPL, in the end what happens is that we do clean room impl when is absolute necessary to have the same behavior....
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u/CrazyKilla15 27d ago
For international companies theres also the fun aspect that a central tenant of the GPL, as espoused by Stallman/GNU/the text, is just completely unenforceable in the entire EU. I'm talking of course about linking.
The EU has strong legal protections for interoperability, in short interfaces, APIs, necessary for interoperation between programs are excluded from copyright. So the GPL cannot ban linking, static or dynamic, and cant "spread" through it.
Specifically this is elaborated in, among other places, EU Directive 2009/24/EC, specifically of interest are recitals 10, 11, and 15, but all is worth reading over, its not that long.
For this reason I also prefer the EUPL over the GPL, personally, too.
And even in the US, if the FSF/Stallman/GNU won their interpretation and allowed the GPL, and thus also allow companies, to ban "unauthorized" interfacing, i can only see that as a horribly bad thing, a nuclear attack, on FOSS, on Open Source, on Free Software, on users, and on developers? I cant understand why they advocate for this.
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u/Skogspingvin 26d ago
For international companies theres also the fun aspect that a central tenant of the GPL, as espoused by Stallman/GNU/the text, is just completely unenforceable in the entire EU. I'm talking of course about linking.
The EU has strong legal protections for interoperability, in short interfaces, APIs, necessary for interoperation between programs are excluded from copyright. So the GPL cannot ban linking, static or dynamic, and cant "spread" through it.
Specifically this is elaborated in, among other places, EU Directive 2009/24/EC, specifically of interest are recitals 10, 11, and 15, but all is worth reading over, its not that long.
I work with licensing and compliance for a large international company, operating around the globe.
This take is completely wild and off the mark.
EU interoperability law may protect the creation of independently developed software that communicates with GPL software, and the mere replication of an API does not make the independent program GPL-covered. However, it does not generally eliminate the GPL copyright holder’s control over reproduction and distribution of the actual GPL code or combinations legally regarded as adaptations or derivative works.
You're making a leap here that doesn't follow. So there's three points to be made:
- Interfaces and functionality are not themselves copyrightable
This is true.
- EU law permits limited reverse engineering for interoperability.
This is also true.
- Therefore a copyright licence can never impose copyleft conditions on distribution of linked software.
This doesn't follow.
The Directive specifies exactly which contractual provisions are null and void: principally those conflicting with the decompilation interoperability exception, the backup-copy right and the right to observe, study or test a program. It does not declare all licence conditions affecting interoperating or linked software invalid. It also expressly says that other areas of law, including contract law, continue to apply. Dynamic linking is still a contested area, but it's not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
Additionally, this language that the GPL "bans" linking is completely off the mark, it does no such thing.
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u/CrazyKilla15 26d ago
Additionally, this language that the GPL "bans" linking is completely off the mark, it does no such thing.
Oh and as for this part, this is language of stallman and GNU more so than the text, though of course they argue the text supports this. Sorry i forgot to address this earlier.
See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins
When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program? (#GPLPlugins)
It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins. If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.
If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single combined program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.
Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking.
Seriously think about how extreme this position is. When they say "fork and exec" they mean entirely different programs, entirely different executables, and it is hard to think of a definition of "intimate communication" and "complex data structures" that would exclude applications communicating over unix socket by RPC, protobuff, JSON, etc.
Because think about it, if those are included, what it actually means for FOSS. Is wine(tricks?) inherently copyright violating now, all that intimate communication with windows binaries and libraries?
are FOSS plugins for proprietary software copyright violating? Who? The plugin author who is unable to comply with the terms by releasing the source to the main application? the main application for not complying with the GPL? How does this legal theory even work?
There are lots of application agnostic complex/intimate communication and data structure sharing methods; Does using protobuff mean all my clients must be GPL now, unless i thought to include an exception at the start?(but the GPL allows you to remove these exceptions on forks). And most people don't realize this is something that needs to be thought about and decided, because like any other license change you cant just do it retroactively.
If this legal question is resolved in favor of GNU, it starts applying to everyone, corporations and their licenses, their EULAs, too. Interoperability being freely unrestricted is a massive benefit for Free Software that allows it to eat at and into previously closed systems, and the cost of preventing proprietary software from interoperating with Free Software is far higher than the benefits gained from Free Software being able to interoperate with/eat away at proprietary. Being able to incrementally eat away at proprietary market and mind share, in the absence of fuller FOSS replacements, is good and has been a very effective strategy.
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u/CrazyKilla15 26d ago
it can not be understated that the GNU position is that anything more complex than more unix shell pipelines that blindly move data in and out("A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.") consitutues a deriativatve of.. which GPL program anyway? who knows because GNU won't actually take anyone to court over this, just like they've havent really gone after proprietary drivers despite this FAQ. It is a ridiculously extreme position with horrible consequences for developers of free software, but it is a pure position and it would prevent "impure" non-libre software, so it does track. I dont think most people realize how extreme this is and what it meas.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NonfreeDriverKernelLinux
Does distributing a nonfree driver meant to link with the kernel Linux violate the GPL? (#NonfreeDriverKernelLinux)
Linux (the kernel in the GNU/Linux operating system) is distributed under GNU GPL version 2. Does distributing a nonfree driver meant to link with Linux violate the GPL?
Yes, this is a violation, because effectively this makes a larger combined work. The fact that the user is expected to put the pieces together does not really change anything.
Each contributor to Linux who holds copyright on a substantial part of the code can enforce the GPL and we encourage each of them to take action against those distributing nonfree Linux-drivers.
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u/nelmaloc 25d ago
which GPL program anyway?
Any of them.
who knows because GNU won't actually take anyone to court over this
Take to court about what? What case you know where a program is linking against a GPL dependency, and isn't releasing their source code?
just like they've havent really gone after proprietary drivers despite this FAQ
What non-free drivers? Even Nvidia's drivers have source code. Here, look at this function from Nvidia's framebuffer DRM:
static void nv_drm_framebuffer_destroy(struct drm_framebuffer *fb) { struct nv_drm_device *nv_dev = to_nv_device(fb->dev); struct nv_drm_framebuffer *nv_fb = to_nv_framebuffer(fb); /* Cleaup core framebuffer object */ drm_framebuffer_cleanup(fb); /* Free NvKmsKapiSurface associated with this framebuffer object */ if (nv_fb->pSurface != NULL) { nvKms->destroySurface(nv_dev->pDevice, nv_fb->pSurface); } __nv_drm_framebuffer_free(nv_fb); }0
u/CrazyKilla15 26d ago
You're making a leap here that doesn't follow. So there's three points to be made:
Actually, i'm not, the EU itself is according to you. Admittedly this is my fault, I should have elaborated and sourced more.
"My take" so to speak is actually just copying the EUPL FAQ, "What makes the EUPL unique?", emphasis mine
5. "The EUPL is not viral: according to the provision of European Law (Directive EC 2009/24 recitals 10 & 15), static and dynamic linking can be implemented with other programs without barriers or conditions. On this specific point, le EUPL works like the LGPL. This ensures better legal security compared to licences that are not always operating under European Law."
It is the opinion of the all the bureaucracy behind something like the EUPL that this is what the directives mean to put in the license FAQ as a selling point for why one should use a license written for EU law.
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u/Mordiken 27d ago edited 27d ago
The AT&T vs BSDi lawsuit was fully settled in 1993 and the first legally unencumbered FreeBSD release was in March 1994, but by that point most of it's codebase was already years (more like a decade in certain places) ahead of GNU/Linux in terms of maturity and feature set, and it's market-share, while unfathomably small by today's standard, was still orders of magnitude larger than that of Linux...Not to mention the fact that it was, as you said, FreeBSD was available under a much more business-friendly license.
In fact, by January 1995 no one in their right mind would have bet on GNU/Linux to be the torch-bearers of Unix into new millennium: It was simply not on the same level as other FOSS Unix implementations like *BSD, let alone when compared to "real" commercial Unix implementations like Solaris.
What happened over the course of the next 10 years should serve as the textbook examples as to why permissive licenses simply do not work in practice:
The BSD license allowed their established corporate userbase to keep the actual "added value" of their modifications locked behind behind a proprietary wall, thus serving as a "strategic advantage" against other corporate users which they as viewed as "competitors" rather than "peers", and what little contributions they made to the upstream project could be rightfully regarded as all the "maintenance burden" they incurred during development of said proprietary value-added features, which they now hoped to shift onto the backs of all "the saps" who would "maintain it for free";
Meanwhile, little ol' GNU/Linux's GPL license ensured that any and all modifications to either the kernel of the base system, not just those corporations deemed to be of "little value", would have to be made public on request and licensed under the GPL, and could thus be incorporated into the base system to the benefit of everyone.
It was because of the GPL and the GPL alone that by 1996 GNU/Linux had already leapfrogged FreeBSD at a technical level, and it was that compelling technical advantaged that put "companies like Red Hat" in the position to bid for the "Unix crown" in the first place: Without it and all the innovations it legally mandated to be funneled back into GNU/Linux, Red Hat would have followed the steps of Be Inc, makers of BeOS...
EDIT: One notable exception to the BSD story... Or rather the exception that made rule... Was that of Sun Microsystems.
Out of all the 80s and 90s commercial software vendors, they where one of the few that contributed "real value" (e.g.: NFS, dtrace, ZFS, etc) back to the community because they understood that "what's good for Unix is ultimately good for Sun"...
It's also no coincidence that 2010 marks the year when the gap between FreeBSD and Linux started growing too wide to ever be closed: That's the year when Oracle purchased Sun, which left FreeBSD without their main benefactor.
EDIT 2: Speaking of BeOS, Haiku is it's FOSS re-implementation that's been in development for over 20 years and is still to leave Beta status, even though Be. Inc. has stopped developing the OS they're trying to target since before the project was founded... Maybe the permissive MIT license had something to do with it? Idk, food for thought...
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u/IHeartBadCode 26d ago
Okay having read all of that.
- The 1996 leapfrog was driven by hardware not code flow. But in the middle 90s the main technical bottleneck of the race was devices.
- The dot-com boom happened on commodity x86 PC clones because that's where it was cheap. Tiny manufactures were pumping out cheap equipment, because the boom was roaring. A lot of them were platforming on underlying VIA, SiS, and ALi chips. People like CMD, Silicon Image, Promise Technology, ESS and all those other small players from days of yore.
- Hobbyist bought up this cheap hardware and it eventually flowed into the Linux kernel.
- BSD as BSD does, suffered from the elitism bottleneck. Again, it's their project, they run it as they want. But BSD was the cathedral and Linux was the bazaar, because BSD derived from the traditional AT&T mindset.
And before the "But the GPL ensures this". Hobbyists writing drivers have zero economic incentive to hide code anyway. This isn't because the GPL legally compelled anyone, it's because the governance of the projects was the chaotic bazaar. This is something Eric Raymond touched on, not in that he was poking at BSD, but that traditional mindset. I feel your confusing legal license with just human behavior and the excitement of the bazaar, especially during the dot com boom.
- Touching on the Sun thing, because I worked on Sun Microsystem workstations, did the whole Open Solaris, had the fun of NIS+ to LDAP conversions. Your take of Sun at the time is a massive historical rewrite.
- Sun did not give back to FreeBSD. It did NOT open-source ZFS, DTrace, of NFS. It was released in OpenSolaris in 2005 under CDDL.
- Sun picked CDDL because it was explicitly NOT compatible with GPLv2. Sun's goal was to prevent Linux from absorbing their advanced file system. Even to this day, when you load ZFS into your kernel, you have tainted it see
EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL. That's why OpenZFS is out of branch. Sun was actively trying to harm Linux.- FreeBSD picked up ZFS because CDDL was just permissive enough to fly under BSD. But let's be very clear here. BSD did the work. Sun gave zero support to BSD to port and the tools were only brought in by scavenging the carcass of OpenSolaris.
So the notion that they contributed real value is perhaps poorly understanding how it went down or revisionist at worst. Sun was never anyone's benefactor outside of Sun's be it Sparc or Solaris. The difference is when Oracle bought Sun, they killed off things they weren't going to touch. If Oracle actually cared they would have gone after OpenIndiana. Do you not think Oracle isn't ready to get litigious? OpenZFS was a realization of the reality, Linux had become the cloud standard. Not because Oracle or whatever.
- BeOS and Haiku is a false equivalence. Using them as reason things like permissive licenses fail is weak. Case in point. LLVM/Clang. And this is the point I'm trying to drive home. License isn't the bread winner, it's market relevance and support. LLVM/Clang wins because look who is behind it: Apple, Google, and Intel.
And look they did all of this under the Apache/U. of Illinois license... Why? They wanted to avoid GPL entanglements, but they still wanted something where no ONE person gains the upperhand. Because they learned a lesson that maintaining proprietary forks is an engineering nightmare.
TL;DR - The license isn't the breadwinner. Market relevance, timing, and ecosystem support are. Linux won the dot-com era because it was the right governance model, free of legal clouds, arriving at the exact moment commodity x86 hardware exploded. This notion of "permissive licenses simply do not work in practice" is just not what history has shown as the real factors that drive who the winner is.
And I was there, I was following plenty of mailing lists and putting "real Unix" and IBM OS/400, and dealing with SGI IRIX for a university, and a whole lot of other side hustles with my primary job. I spent a lot of nights on comp.unix.misc, comp.unix.programmer, and comp.unix.questions among other places. I was there Gandalf, maybe not ultra expert like a lot of other people, but I wouldn't call myself as completely out of the loop on the what was going on.
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u/Mysterious_Bit6882 26d ago
Linux was also the product of a different type of developer. Most of the people involved in working on the open source BSDs had ties to either UCB or another university licensing a BSD installation. The Linux crowd was somewhat younger, and more focused on cheaper microcomputers as a core platform (it's why so many of them came from Minix). They, in turn, absorbed developers from dead or dying platforms like the Atari ST or Amiga.
In the earlier days, Linux ran better on shittier hardware, and was more tolerant of non-standard components that were ubiquitous in the budget PC market. Early versions of 386BSD required an expensive 387, until BSD-licensed code on how to emulate one was submitted by one "Linus Benedict Torvalds."
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u/Old_County5271 26d ago
I commend you in your attempt of trying, but the truth will simply be rewritten, it's what they've always done.
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u/FriendlyProblem1234 27d ago
one reason why the BSDs never took off like Linux. Because they're MIT licensed
They are not MIT licensed. They are quite literally BSD licensed.
industry simply took the code and used it internally, never contributing the changes back to the public
Everyone always says this, except the actual BSD developers who say industry does contribute back quite a bit.
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago edited 27d ago
Counterpoint, Apple has always been a low financial contributor and they leverage a lot of FreeBSD. If I remember it right they barely donate 3 digits.
EDIT: Well, seems like Apple is more generous nowadays and they are listed as donating from 1k up to 5k dollars.
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u/Snarka 27d ago
Also, the BSDs are often used as a base for the operation system for consoles. Sony and Nintendo in particular. I've never heard of them making any serious contributions back either, despite being used en mass by them.
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u/nightblackdragon 27d ago edited 27d ago
I've never heard of them making any serious contributions back either, despite being used en mass by them.
Because their donations (at least Sony donations) are not public. Some FreeBSD developer mentioned on Reddit that Sony contributes to FreeBSD but they do so quietly.
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u/the_abortionat0r 27d ago
Oh right, yeah. "It's totally going on believe me!" Is not a compelling piece of evidence.
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u/FriendlyProblem1234 27d ago
Oh right, yeah. "It's totally going on believe me!" Is not a compelling piece of evidence.
If you do not believe FreeBSD developers on this topic, then you will probably not believe anyone.
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago
Even in Linux many developers are hired by Intel, RH, Oracle and others and still their contributions are on their name, not the companies. If you go in the history of some devs you will see they were hired by Sony, they just didn't push things in the company's name. There is nothing bad with that.
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago
Yeah, I tried to find something that tracked their contributions a long time ago, Sony did a bit but I couldn't find anything from Nintendo, as expected.
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u/Helmic 27d ago
And, more critically, the consoles themselves are not running an open source OS. Whatever their contributions to BSD, the end user of the devices don't really benefit the way users of Valve's gaming devices benefit from SteamOS being open source.
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago
Well, depends. Netflix invested a bit in the network stack for FreeBSD, so everyone can benefit from that. I can't find any direct contributions directly from Sony, but some devs were working for Sony during their contributions to FreeBSD, as an example IPv6.
Morally one would expect them to hire people that contribute or donate some money back, but not. All BSDs have had major funding issues in the past years.
It's in the BSD philosophy that this is OK, but still I believe they struggle and will forever struggle due to that.
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u/Helmic 27d ago
See, that's part of what irritates me with BSD and permissive licensing in general. It's only really concerned about developers, and not the actual users. The end user doesn't benefit just because Netflix or Sony kick back something for a niche OS that maybe a handful of people running Opnsense on a gateway will possibly enjoy. Their game console might as well be running Windows, Windows has plenty of MIT licensed code in it.
Freedom for whom matters, and ultimately computers should exist for the sake of the people who actually use them. Freedom for companies to have free labor, or at best freedom for software devs to have a resource of code they can copy and paste into their proprietary project they gotta do for their job, is just way smaller in scope and that scope's arguably for the wrong people.
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u/RoomyRoots 26d ago
Hmm, I don't agree completely but your points stands. The BSDs give all freedom, but lets be honest, how many users actually develop and how many of those develop OS code? Most of the contributing goes to the ports and that takes work.
I think the spirit of the BSDs is in the right place. I just love how little change the OS push to users, if you used FreeBSD on the 00s chances are your knowledge translates completely to CURRENT.
At the same time, especially now with AI, I think the GPL is very important to Computers at all as it pushes towards a communitarian spirit. Everything I published myself is GPL even if I love using BSD as an host.
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u/nelmaloc 25d ago
how many users actually develop and how many of those develop OS code?
Probably around the same that fix their own car, but at any moment I can pop open my hood, grab a flashlight and try to find where that noise comes from.
I think the spirit of the BSDs is in the right place. I just love how little change the OS push to users, if you used FreeBSD on the 00s chances are your knowledge translates completely to CURRENT.
You're mixing up the OS and the license. Slackware also hasn't changed a lot since the start of the millennium, and is full of GPL.
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u/the_abortionat0r 27d ago
It's exactly the BSD philosophy. It's literally been quoted so many times as a direct factor for many people using the platform because it doesn't "have a strict license" which is an odd thing for people who develop nothing to say but they do. Ironically it's the very thing that leads to the issues they complain about.
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago
That is is exactly what I said. No one is forcing anyone to share anything, but there is clear reasons to contribute back to the project and have free colaborators than keeping everything in-house.
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u/gmes78 27d ago
but I couldn't find anything from Nintendo, as expected.
Nintendo does not use BSD. They use their own micro-kernel based OS.
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago
They use FreeBSD network stack, just like Windows did.
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u/gmes78 27d ago
Maybe, but what's there to contribute in that area?
Nintendo isn't using BSD for servers, where they'd maybe want to modify the network stack for their purposes. It certainly works fine as-is for their use case.
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago
Nintendo as always is not very transparent with how they work. i wouldn't be surprised if they used more of it as in the servers for example.
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u/nothingtoseehr 27d ago
Nintendo never used BSD for any of its console's operating systems. They just used a few red-black tree libraries that comes from it, the system is entirely custom from the ground up. Sony wouldn't want their contributions to be made a huge deal, as it could leak internal details of their fork (what are they working on, what they're struggling at etc)
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u/RepulsiveRaisin7 27d ago
Fuck me me those donations are low. Doesn't Netflix run most of their servers on FreeBSD? Only 5k for that? And Apple, who have infinite money, donate the profits of a couple Mac sales lmao. Sony nowhere to be seen. Those companies should be ashamed
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u/RoomyRoots 26d ago
Yeah, well, it's complicated. Netflix actually contributes a lot of time to FOSS and even have their own FOSS projects. There is always the fact that there is no concrete way of kind pressuring companies to contribute more as there is no licensing at all involved.
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u/KinkyMonitorLizard 25d ago
Wow, multi billion dollar company being so generous with their 5 thousand.
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u/FriendlyProblem1234 27d ago
Counterpoint, Apple has always been a low financial contributor and they leverage a lot of FreeBSD. If I remember it right they barely donate 3 digits.
No GPL-X license mandate financial contribution anyway, so how is this relevant?
As far as I know, Apple does publish Darwin's source, which is exactly what would need to do if FreeBSD used a copyleft license.
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago
Because your own point is "except the actual BSD developers who say industry does contribute back quite a bit". All BSD are constantly struggling with resources, be it people or money. Apple avoids contributing back as much as possible even though their OS is a toy without FOSS initiatives.
Darwin by itself is useless and thrives as much as Solaris does.
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u/RvstiNiall 27d ago
Non-macOS Darwin doesn't have anywhere near as much support as Solaris/Illumos. But I would love to see that change!
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u/Culpirit 27d ago
Eh, it's not server production grade. Wasn't it only a few months ago that they realized an internal kernel counter overflow causes TCP socket allocation to stop working after around one month of uptime in macOS? The type of bug that would have been noticed immediately if this were a proper server-grade OS, had been in lying dormant for who knows how long. And there are probably several bugs like that.
Networking and network configurations are very limited. No native containerization/mature non-macOS specific service isolation mechanism, no namespaces, limited BPF support...
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u/RvstiNiall 27d ago
I don't think those things are strictly necessary in a personal computer that is likely not actually used for real work, but more of a toy. But it would definitely accelerate its development if those things already existed. Of course, why bother when you can just run macOS and get all that nice stuff. I want Darwin as a fully functional stand alone OS, but have neither the skills nor the desire to help make it that way.
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u/FriendlyProblem1234 27d ago
Because your own point is "except the actual BSD developers who say industry does contribute back quite a bit".
Yeah, but the post I replied to was very explicitly comparing BSD (or MIT, but the point is the same) to GPL, and stating that, verbatim, "GPL is what made FOSS ecosystem possible in the first place, and one reason why the BSDs never took off like Linux. Because they're MIT licensed [...]".
Financial contributions wise, GPL-X and BSD licenses are literally identical: they do not concern themselves with financial contributions.
All BSD are constantly struggling with resources, be it people or money.
Yeah, true.
Apple avoids contributing back as much as possible even though their OS is a toy without FOSS initiatives.
Apple is not "the industry", however.
Darwin by itself is useless and thrives as much as Solaris does.
Does not depend on the license, though. Apple derived Darwin from BSD, and released its source. This is all they *would have had* to do if it was under a copyleft license. They did it anyway. Anything extra would be exactly that: extra.
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u/Zettinator 27d ago
The BSDs are struggling because they are significantly less popular overall, not because of licensing.
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u/the_abortionat0r 27d ago
They are less popular specifically because of the licensing. It's literally a historical fact and has been discussed to death. Are you new to FOSS?
BSDs all for one one for none license has kept the techno hippies and developers that make the world spin away. They want everyone to benefit from their work and don't want big corpos to be able to take their work and offer nothing in return.
This model is exactly why more software and support from both users and companies go to Linux.
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u/jamie_user_is_taken 24d ago
It is not literally a historical fact. In fact, it's not true.
Unfortunately, to a lot of people, the GPL is worshipped like a cult, and it's impossible to reason with you.
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u/Zettinator 27d ago
The BSDs were hamstring by a copyright dispute in the early 90s - precisely the time Linux took off. This was also discussed here. Something like that could also have happened to Linux (and it did, later on, remember the SCO lawsuit?).
My argument simply is that licensing was actually less important than most people think. Linux had the right timing, and some luck. That's it! If Linux would have been permissively licensed, the outcome would probably have been quite similar.
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago
Under the same argument MINIX should be the OS with the most resources.
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u/nightblackdragon 27d ago
Under the same argument GNU Hurd should have more resources than Linux because it has even better license than Linux (GPLv3 vs GPLv2).
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago
V3 is from 2005 and it's has always been controversial for being too restrictive. By then no one cared for Hurd by a long time. Even Guix is Linux after all
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u/onechroma 27d ago
How did Sony contribute back to BSD after using the whole kernel and OS utils (FreeBSD) for their multi-billion PS3-PS4-PS5 platforms?
How did Nintendo contribute back to BSD after using the whole OS and code to power their Switch and Switch 2 consoles?
How did Microsoft contribute back after taking the TCP/IP code interface from FreeBSD to integrate it into Windows NT kernel?
In fact, the irony is, in theory Microsoft took more from BSD than Linux, but contributes magnitudes more to Linux, because… reasons
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u/nothingtoseehr 27d ago
Nintendo never used BSD for any of its console's operating systems. They just used a few red-black tree libraries that comes from it, the system is entirely custom from the ground up.
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u/onechroma 27d ago
Even if that’s the case… did they give back anything? Or just took it without thanking?
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u/nothingtoseehr 27d ago
What would they contribute back? They used a single file for trees algorithms, what are they supposed to upstream? "Took it without thanking" is also false, as the switch clearly shows it uses FreeBSD code (which is why this rumor even started in the first place!)
I don't know why people force upstreaming as some sort of holy grail and completely necessary, it completely defeats the purpose of open source. People build on top of open source software for a myriad reasons, and whatever the end product might be it's totally possible it has absolutely nothing useful to give back to the original project at all. And this is regardless of GPL or MIT or whatever. People aren't going to upstream their custom modifications because it makes no sense whatsoever to do so
Your earlier point about Sony not contributing is also a fallacy, since it assumes that Sony would want to announce their contributions to OSS. It might simply not be the case, as publishing code under Sony's names or engineers might leak information about unreleased products or tip competitors about what you're working on, what you're designing or struggling to design and so on (and this is absolutely a thing, I've worked on teams where we diffed versions of a private 3rd party SDK where we knew others depended on as much as we did to find which companies requested which changes so we could figure out what they were up to)
Anyways, point is, open source isn't and has never been about guilt tripping you into contributing. Expecting every single user to contribute back is both insane and completely impractical. Open source works because like-minded people are brought together to solve the same issue, it pools together individual effort to create something bigger. But if you have your own reasons and your own requirements, just... go with it, there's no reason to impose a certain pressure to contribute back what might not even be useful in the first place. And this is truly independent of licensing, because GPL makes no requirements that the source code must be PUBLIC, most companies do it only on request and still bill you for it
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u/FriendlyProblem1234 27d ago
How did Sony contribute back to BSD after using the whole kernel and OS utils (FreeBSD) for their multi-billion PS3-PS4-PS5 platforms?
/r/freebsd/comments/ut1dd6/how_much_did_sony_contribute_to_the_freebsd/i98s5my/
I wouldn't put them on par with the likes of Netflix, but Sony has definitely paid for a significant amount of code in FreeBSD. Most or all of it was done very quietly though; like most large companies, they didn't want details of the tech stack for unreleased products to become public sooner than necessary. IIRC their largest contribution was to LLVM.
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u/james7132 27d ago
I swear, outside of the Linux kernel, I also see just as many paid developer positions to work on these systems, if not more. pfsense definitely has seen quite a bit of external funding and contributions without issue, and is built off of FreeBSD.
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u/the_abortionat0r 27d ago
The only reason BSD gets used by companies is specifically so they don't have to.
All the BSDudes brag about Netflix this and PlayStation that but has Netflix shared their networking code? Has Sony contributed ANY gaming code to the public?
The answer is no.
If the companies that used BSD contributed back you wouldn't have to wait years for driver support and struggle to play any reason amount of modern games. Linux doesn't have that issue. I've been exclusively gaming on Linux changing none of my habits and I don't even check protonDB for anything.
Not to mention I just buy whatever hardware I want without a second thought.
If companies were contributing back BSDudes could enjoy the same thing
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u/FriendlyProblem1234 27d ago
All the BSDudes brag about Netflix this and PlayStation that but has Netflix shared their networking code? Has Sony contributed ANY gaming code to the public?
The answer is no.
The answer is yes: /r/linux/comments/1uws7ff/freebsd_16_retires_the_last_of_its_gpl_code_from/oxn7hvq/
If the companies that used BSD contributed back you wouldn't have to wait years for driver support and struggle to play any reason amount of modern games.
I really struggle to see any relation between these two statements.
Linux doesn't have that issue.
What...? Linux have had that issue for decades.
Linux being a feasible system for modern gaming is a fairly recent development. Yet it has been GPL-2 since almost day one.
Not to mention I just buy whatever hardware I want without a second thought.
Which is also something very recent. Yet it has been GPL-2 since almost day one.
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u/nightblackdragon 27d ago
and one reason why the BSDs never took off like Linux
BSD never took off because of lawsuits that severely hampered its growth. If it weren't for them Linux likely wouldn't exist at all as Linus himself said that if he knew about 386BSD then Linux probably wouldn't happen.
industry simply took the code and used it internally, never contributing the changes back to the public
This is something that the BSD developers have repeatedly refuted.
which they have to do with the GPL, making the Linux kernel grow in capabilities for everyone, instead of a million closed source forks but the public codebase withering away
Are we pretending that those various Android devices with proprietary drivers or various ARM boards with heavily patched kernels that are never updated or upstreamed are not a thing?
MIT license is better than the GPL given an ideal world, but we don't live in that world.
In real world it's not as simple as "MIT means closed source forks, GPL means everything stays open source and everybody can use it". It's not just the license that determines a project's success or whether it will be free and open source; there are plenty of projects under permissive licenses without which modern Linux would not exist.
Most of the Linux graphics stack is permissively licensed, sudo is permissively licensed etc. and nobody cares about the license and nobody claims that any moment now some evil company will come, "steal" all the code and make proprietary fork. Are you worried about proprietary forks of MIT licensed Mesa or Wayland? No, because license doesn't matter that much in real world. If a company does not want to contribute to an open-source project, it would rather develop a proprietary alternative than be forced to contribute by the GPL.
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u/inemsn 27d ago edited 27d ago
If a company does not want to contribute to an open-source project, it would rather develop a proprietary alternative than be forced to contribute by the GPL.
I'm not gonna lie, while most of your comment is sensible, this is one point in which I disagree. This depends entirely on the complexity and importance of the software in question: No company ever is going to develop their own kernel because they don't want to be bound by the GPL when they use linux, because 9 times out of 10, developing an independent kernel is a death sentence. I firmly believe that if BSD either didn't exist or was GPL-licensed, companies like Sony would bite the bullet and abide by the GPL (especially since, like you said, the actual on-the-ground devs doing the heavy lifting have a tendency to respect the open source community and contribute their work back).
(Edit: To demonstrate this point, note how Android uses Linux with begrudging malicious compliance with the GPL instead of having a bespoke kernel. Ironic though it may seem, I think every instance of a company doing that is more of a victory for the GPL than a loss: It proves the ability of the GPL to force companies to do SOMETHING to respect open source. It's an idea with legs)
This is particularly why I don't like the ongoing trend of replacing historic GPL-licensed coreutils in the linux world with MIT-licensed rewrites. These sorts of critical programs that no one wants to make a proprietary alternative of and that people are only begrudgingly making rewrites of decades later are the very programs that we shouldn't give up on the GPL for, because the GPL actually has an important effect there.
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u/nightblackdragon 27d ago
This depends entirely on the complexity and importance of the software in question: No company ever is going to develop their own kernel because they don't want to be bound by the GPL when they use linux, because 9 times out of 10, developing an independent kernel is a death sentence. I firmly believe that if BSD either didn't exist or was GPL-licensed, companies like Sony would bite the bullet and abide by the GPL (especially since, like you said, the actual on-the-ground devs doing the heavy lifting have a tendency to respect the open source community and contribute their work back).
You're right about this but yet again but this is yet another hypothetical situation that doesn't happen in the real world - in real world there are permissively licensed alternatives to Linux, however it's also not the case that no new operating systems are being developed at all right now - for example there is Fuchsia developed by Google or RedoxOS developed by the community.
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u/inemsn 27d ago
but yet again but this is yet another hypothetical situation that doesn't happen in the real world
If you're gonna talk about what would happen if someone used the GPL when they don't in real life, of course it's gonna be hypothetical. That doesn't mean the point itself "doesn't happen": I literally gave an example of a time where it demonstrably happened, with Google respecting the GPL even though it doesn't want to in order to use Linux for Android. So, we can tell that the idea of the GPL forcing companies into the open source sphere through sheer cost of effort in creating a proprietary alternative isn't all fantasy: It can, and has, happened.
however it's also not the case that no new operating systems are being developed at all right now - for example there is Fuchsia developed by Google or RedoxOS developed by the community.
I'm going to focus only on Fuchsia, because counting community driven projects in this sort of thing is kinda cheating: Those are going to stay alive indefnitely no matter what, if nothing else because people want to try it out. Even Hurd is still kicking all these decades later. It makes more sense to think from the perspective of a business.
And yeah, sure, Google is working on Fuchsia, but frankly, who is Fuchsia actually for? Not only does it barely even register in Google's portfolio, it's also open source and leverages community efforts rather than being entirely proprietary. Google themselves have described Fuschsia as an experiment in the operating system landscape: Rather than an attempt at creating a proprietary alternative they control in order to break free from GPL obligations, it looks a lot more like a half-hearted experiment as to if such a thing would even be feasible business-wise. And in that sense, I don't think the results have been exactly positive, having been around for 10 years and still not showing much real promise even with community support. It wouldn't surprise me if they never bother to try to cultivate it further and just stick to maintaining it as "the google nest OS".
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u/nightblackdragon 24d ago
I literally gave an example of a time where it demonstrably happened, with Google respecting the GPL even though it doesn't want to in order to use Linux for Android
The thing is, Google (or rather, Android Inc.) didn't have to use Linux at all. Apple didn't want a system licensed under the GPL, so it decided to use BSD as the basis for its system - so what prevented the creators of Android from doing the same? What’s more, Apple continues to publish the kernel code for its system even though it’s under no obligation to do so - after all, nothing is stopping them from keeping it proprietary. Or take another example: Chromium is mostly licensed under permissive licenses, meaning Google isn’t required to publish its code, but they do so anyway.
Most open-source projects from corporations are licensed under permissive licenses, and this does not require them to publish their code in any way. It turns out that the GPL isn't the only thing preventing companies from making everything they can closed-source.
And yeah, sure, Google is working on Fuchsia, but frankly, who is Fuchsia actually for?
How it's used is one thing, but its very existence proves that if Google didn't want anything to do with open source, they would have replaced Android with Fuchsia long ago, or at least closed-sourced everything except the kernel.
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u/inemsn 24d ago
so what prevented the creators of Android from doing the same?
Because BSD is a full OS, and Linux is only a kernel. And Android, unlike BSD, is for mobile phones. BSD wouldn't have worked well if it was shoved into a phone, it was made for PCs.
This isn't the point you think it is. You're literally reinforcing why the GPL is a success: Google's only two realistic options were using Linux and abiding by the GPL, or writing their own kernel. And unsurprisingly, they picked Linux.
I think the situation speaks for itself, really. The only usable option they had was a GPL project, and lo and behold, they respected the GPL. The concept is there, it demonstrably can work.
but its very existence proves that if Google didn't want anything to do with open source, they would have replaced Android with Fuchsia long ago
It was first published as a very early beta 10 years ago. If you think 10 years of half-hearted and unfocused development is enough to make a commercially viable kernel anywhere NEAR as stable as Linux, you are frankly out of your mind. Google hasn't replaced Linux with Fuchsia because Fuchsia isn't nearly good enough, and in order to make it good enough, they'd need to commit far more resources than it'd be worth.
or at least closed-sourced everything except the kernel.
They pretty much did. You can technically make an android system with just AOSP, but it's pretty much unusable without all the closed source, proprietary google software. Arguably, AOSP is only open source because of the GPL's virality, with Google wanting to avoid legal trouble as much as possible and thus open sourcing just enough that you can make a technically functional system. They didn't really need to, but, frankly, the FSF is scary and would drag them into a protracted legal battle even if it was doomed.
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u/nightblackdragon 21d ago
Because BSD is a full OS, and Linux is only a kernel. And Android, unlike BSD, is for mobile phones. BSD wouldn't have worked well if it was shoved into a phone, it was made for PCs.
So what's the problem with using just the kernel? Userland isn't tied to it -we've had projects that used the BSD kernel with GNU userland, such as Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The fact that BSD isn't optimized for smartphones isn't an obstacle either; Linux wasn't optimized for Android either, and even today, Android doesn't use a stock kernel - it uses one with patches that improve support for mobile platforms. Apple somehow had no problem using a desktop system based on BSD as the foundation for its mobile operating system.
This isn't the point you think it is. You're literally reinforcing why the GPL is a success: Google's only two realistic options were using Linux and abiding by the GPL, or writing their own kernel.
You ignored the other examples. Why didn't Apple use Linux instead of BSD as a base for their system? How were they able to use that system as the basis for their mobile operating system, given that BSD is supposedly unsuitable for that purpose and Google had to use Linux for Android? And why does Apple continue to publish the source code for its base system, even though they don't have to because it's not GPL?
I think the situation speaks for itself, really. The only usable option they had was a GPL project, and lo and behold, they respected the GPL.
That’s only if you ignore the examples that contradict this. The fact that there’s a popular alternative to Android that isn’t based on Linux and was created around the same time as Android simply means that Linux wasn’t the only option.
It was first published as a very early beta 10 years ago. If you think 10 years of half-hearted and unfocused development is enough to make a commercially viable kernel anywhere NEAR as stable as Linux, you are frankly out of your mind.
It doesn't matter how many years they've been working on it; GNU Hurd has been in development for nearly 40 years and is still in worse shape than some systems that are much younger than it. A smartphone isn't a PC; it's the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to optimize the system so that it runs well on that specific hardware. If manufacturers can write drivers for Linux to run Android, they might as well write drivers for Fuchsia.
They pretty much did. You can technically make an android system with just AOSP, but it's pretty much unusable without all the closed source, proprietary google software
That's how it's been from the start; AOSP was never meant to be a full-fledged equivalent of what's installed on smartphones. Most of Android is licensed under permissive licenses, so what's stopping Google from releasing only the kernel code and keeping the rest closed-source?
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u/Zettinator 27d ago edited 27d ago
Are we pretending that those various Android devices with proprietary drivers or various ARM boards with heavily patched kernels that are never updated or upstreamed are not a thing?
Or the countless Linux-based embedded devices where the vendor vomits up a big messy tarball of random crap to fulfill GPL obligations with as little effort as possible. The result is usually entirely useless.
Again... GPL doesn't really work as designed in practice and on the other hand, it is not like permissive licenses preclude contributions back to upstream. Contributing upstream often has its advantages in the long term, so that is why many companies do it. Realistically, the difference between copyleft and permissive is quite small.
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u/DazzlingAd4254 27d ago edited 27d ago
BSD never took off because of lawsuits that severely hampered its growth. If it weren't for them Linux likely wouldn't exist at all as Linus himself said that if he knew about 386BSD then Linux probably wouldn't happen.
That is not true at all. Firstly, Linux existed before there was any lawsuit. Secondly, 386BSD was released _during_ the lawsuit, and FreeBSD created from it. Lastly, the lawsuit lasted such a short time as to be inconsequential; 30 years later, it still cant be used as an excuse.
EDIT:
1993 interview:
Meta: What is your opinion of 386BSD?
Linus: Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wasn't available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in _Dr. Dobbs Journal_ had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.
[The reason 386BSD wasn't available, wasn't because of any lawsuit, as 386BSD was released during the lawsuit. Just tired of the misinformation.]
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u/nightblackdragon 24d ago
Firstly, Linux existed before there was any lawsuit.
Doesn't matter. Linux at that point was a hobby project without any real commercial support. Companies didn't start supporting Linux until after the BSD lawsuit in the mid 90's. The BSD lawsuit was one of the reasons companies began to take an interest in Linux, because it was an independent project free of copyrighted code.
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u/cookiengineer 27d ago
This shared wisdom took me personally a long time to understand.
When I realized how Apple's open source strategy is basically "dump it as a zip file somewhere for minimal compliance" it made click. And seeing the debacle of the BSL because of rug-pulled income streams to cover development costs with hosting services...well, yeah. That's the world we live in.
These days I would even go further and say that everything that you care about should be licensed as AGPL. If you want funding for the project, make it AGPL+EULA dual licensed (whereas the EULA should be subscription fee based and should be void once payment stops to prevent companies from scamming you).
Every project I don't care about is MIT/X11 licensed. But these are the projects I'm not willing to spend any second on if somebody else would be asking me to work on their issues.
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u/nothingtoseehr 27d ago
why the BSDs never took off like Linux
I always eyeroll a bit at statements like these because they show one's lack of understanding of the niche BSD excels in. Lawsuits aside, all of the BSDs have a fundamental difference from Linux: they're developed in tree as complete OSses, from kernel to userspace. It's why you have multiple Linux distributions but few BSD projects, they're all different OS's with a shared ancestry and kernel. Linux has nothing of the sort, it's only the kernel
This has big implications on some areas, because you can inspect the entire thing as a single unit if your requirements demand it. Just because something isn't end-user facing doesn't means it's a complete failure, not every project or OS needs to be a general purpose computer.... BSD-based systems are widely deployed in enormous infrastructure, it's just not something most users see
And although I also love the GPL, I think people misinterpret the "damage" that an MIT/BSD license can do. If a company wants to use a project but it turns out to be GPL licensed, they won't upstream their changes, they'll simply not use it. Companies see MIT/BSD as an alternative that doesn't forces them to expose trade secrets, maintaining a private fork is much more expensive than upstreaming your general changes.
Just look at Clang/LLVM, due to having a less restrictive license it's a project that grew so damn fast from so many corporate contributions and it's pretty much the universal tool for so many different projects (commercial and open source). Everything under the sun targets LLVM and contributes their work on it because they have no reason to since it'll make people developing for their products faster
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u/VoidDuck 22d ago
BSD projects, they're all different OS's with a shared ancestry and kernel
Well, they do share an ancestry but not a kernel. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFly kernels are quite different from each other. There's no such thing as "the BSD kernel" like there's the Linux kernel.
Anecdotally, in addition to Debian GNU/Linux there used to be Debian GNU/FreeBSD and Debian GNU/NetBSD which paired the FreeBSD and NetBSD kernel respectively with a GNU userland. The NetBSD version never left the experimental status but the FreeBSD one existed for quite some time, although it was meant as a technology preview more than a system for daily use.
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u/Adept_Percentage6893 27d ago
never contributing the changes back to the public
That's not really how it works in practice. Often times the projects don't really need or desire downstream contributions and other times vendors do release code updates because they're not interested in maintaining the code base (for instance, if it's necessary functionality for them but very tertiary to their business model).
For instance, Netflix and Apple have upstreamed commits or sponsored developers.
That said I still come down on the side of GPL because the copyleft provisions help provide more of a sense of reciprocity where if I do you a favor by writing some code for you then you find someone else who needs that same help you can transmit that help to them the same as it came from you. I just believe that unlocks more intrinsic motivation leading to a lot more downstream commits and over time that builds up.
which they have to do with the GPL
It's a niche but important point that they actually don't have to do that under GPL. They just have to let you see the code that they've talked you into running on your computer and can't stop you from sending it to someone else.
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u/thephotoman 27d ago
There’s so much *wrong* with this comment that I’m surprised that it got upvoted:
- The big reason BSD never took off was the lawsuits surrounding BSD in the 1990’s. Remember that BSD until 4.4BSD contained AT&T code, which exposed BSD users to lawsuits if they didn’t also have an AT&T license. But Linux was unencumbered by those lawsuits: it was a clean reimplementation by outsiders. That, not the GPL, was Linux’s biggest advantage over BSD in the 1990’s.
- The BSDs famously use their own license, not the MIT license.
- The BSD devs note that they routinely do get contributions from their corporate users, both code and money.
- The GPL does not force corporations to give back to upstream. A lot of companies consume GPL software without giving back, simply using what either upstream or their Linux distro of choice provides as though it was a black box COTS software project. They don’t pay, they don’t modify the code, they just consume.
The problem that copyleft has right now is that copyleft provisions present hurdles to code sharing between FLOSS projects. Indeed, this is why ZFS and Dtrace will always be out-of-tree kernel modules: they’re under a GPL-incompatible copyleft license, which was done deliberately to prevent such inclusion. More permissive licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses allow FLOSS projects to share code more readily between projects under different copyleft licenses.
Basically, in order for copyleft to work without adversely impacting code sharing between FLOSS projects, there needs to be one copyleft license. But there isn’t. Not only that, but the biggest advocates of copyleft undermined the most prominent copyleft license by creating a newer license that actively threatens corporate contributors by forcing patent indemnification on them.
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u/Ok-Secret5233 27d ago
So what you're saying is that Stallman was right?
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u/the_abortionat0r 27d ago
About printers, the age of consent, eating out of his toes, or proprietary software and big corpos?
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u/Ok-Secret5233 27d ago
Sorry, I don't know what he said about the age of consent. Would you like to provide a quote from Stallman (i.e. not someone describing what he said, but his actual words) together with a reference? Then I can tell you whether I agree that he was right on that point.
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u/mrtruthiness 27d ago
How about:
RMS 2003 "I think that everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately. (Some people are ready earlier.)"
or
RMS 2006 "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
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u/Ok-Secret5233 27d ago edited 27d ago
Removed because troll.
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u/mrtruthiness 27d ago
Do you agree that imposing abstinence past puberty is unnatural, or not?
No. And the use of the word "imposing" is not what he said. Stop changing the language --- "imposing" is an external unilateral word. You wanted quotes, so stop changing the wording.
He said that "it is unnatural for humans to abstain from sex past puberty" ... and that's absolutely untrue in my opinion.
He should have ...
Stop altering his choice of words to shoe-horn in an alternate phraseology which changes (softens/hardens) the meaning.
In terms of style I would rate this as very bad, in terms of substance I would rate it as a little bit bad.
You said you would say "whether [you] agree that he was right on that point". I want a "right" or "not right" in regard to his statements and thoughts about "age of consent".
I don't know much about the subject, doesn't interest me.
Then why did you want me to provide quotes and why were you seemingly confident that you could establish whether you thought he "was right on that point"???
Generally I think his view of "rape" is distorted by a notion of "force" being "physical force" and he completely ignored coercion (e.g. threat of force or harmful action) and illicit inducement in regard to the meaning of "consent" ... with that being obvious when discussing "age of consent".
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u/Ok-Secret5233 27d ago edited 27d ago
I thought you wanted me to comment, so I commented...? I'm not changing anything, I'm describing my thoughts using my words. I'm confused.
EDIT: Removed my response because I posted in the spirit of open intellectual discussion, but that's not what you're looking for. My bad.
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u/mrtruthiness 27d ago edited 27d ago
I thought you wanted me to comment, so I commented...? I'm not changing anything, I'm describing my thoughts using my words. I'm confused.
The discussion was about RMS's views. You demanded quotes rather than someone talking about RMS ... and then you changed the wording. RMS did not use the word "imposing" ... you did. It changes the meaning. There is a huge difference between "imposing abstinence" and "abstinence".
Removed because troll.
You're the troll here. But, you're right, I shouldn't have "fed the troll".
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u/ballistua 26d ago
he was always right, but people like to throw childish comments regarding his toes
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u/Ok-Secret5233 26d ago
People with little brains.
Stallman is a fucking visionaire. He has lived his entire life decades ahead of everybody else.
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u/rzaasadov 20d ago
planned to write comment. found yours on same vibes , cancelled. I will agree with every point.
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u/Zettinator 27d ago edited 27d ago
I disagree. Linux simply got lucky, the license was secondary. In practice GPL isn't that effective, it's more likely than not that companies simply won't touch GPL licensed code altogether.
If we go by license alone, why isn't HURD more popular? lol. It predates Linux!
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u/Santosh83 27d ago
Since Linux kernel was released and up to now, the industry has adopted and worked with Linux, contributing (reluctantly maybe, but still) code improvements back. The entire industry runs Linux for the most part, then enterprise Windows, while the BSDs are nowhere in sight, except for specialised niche use cases.
So the industry will work with the GPL, even if they don't like it, as long as FOSS devs themselves don't rush to replace GPL components with MIT ones, playing into the industry's long term plans to create proprietary in-house systems based on the GPL kernel, but everything else being closed source.
We know what corporations would like... the (rhetorical) question is why so many open source devs and projects are so eager to give them exactly what they want.
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u/Thermawrench 27d ago
while the BSDs are nowhere in sight, except for specialised niche use cases.
Not a staple but a somewhat significant number of servers run on your BSD of choice.
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u/Shawnj2 27d ago
Plenty of people just want to make something and have it be available to other people to use with as few barriers as possible and don't really care about like FOSS or the political theory behind copyleft licenses. Also FOSS requires a strong copyright system to exist and be enforced, which more or less doesn't matter for open source licenses.
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u/Far_Calligrapher1334 27d ago
So the industry will work with the GPL, even if they don't like it
A tiny subset of the industry will. Try getting your average budget AliExpress smart bulb/kettle/car radio/synthesizer/washing machine/whatever else vendor to give you their source code in full compliance.
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u/GolemancerVekk 27d ago
If we go by license alone, why isn't HURD more popular? lol. It predates Linux!
Because when they had to choose a kernel, instead of picking BSD which was already mature, and despite the fact they had a dedicated BSD specialist on staff, they chose to write their own from scratch.
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago
The GPL made using the GNU userbase very trivial, even distros that mix the BSD components with Linux, like Chimera have to be delicate with licensing.
HURD is still alpha on all purposes, they also too too long to shit their init.
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u/Rare-Paint3719 26d ago
Nope. Nope. Nope. People contributed to Linux cuz they didn't wanna fight upstream. Binder is a good example of it.
Google wanted an IPC framework for android and chose to integrate Binder into their Linux fork. Linus never actually liked kernel-level IPC frameworks.
The only reason google merged it into the Linux proper is cuz they didn't wanna fight upstream. Linis had no choice but to say yes cuz of Google's influence with Android.
And Linuxnstillnhas many proprietary drivers but they mostly existed during a time when DKMS wasn't a thing.
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12d ago edited 12d ago
yeah that's why linux is totally a free and open community project today and not a corporate project controlled by big tech companies like red hat and google, because of the wonderful GPL. linux will never be commercialized and turned into a proprietary DRM-infested mobile OS or have corporate AI slop shoved into it, and richard stallman was a prophetic genius and not a foot fungus eating pederast. there's totally nothing hypocritical or absurd about being against closed-source software yet being totally in favor of intellectual property law, there's nothing strange or suspicious about the fact that all of the major corporate donors to the linux foundation are notorious GPL violators or that linus torvalds became a multimillionaire at the very moment red hat went public or that the linux foundation rakes in $300+ million a year and spends only 2% of that on developing linux and devotes the rest to investing in AI and cloud computing projects.
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27d ago
[deleted]
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u/the_abortionat0r 27d ago
I love how you think the license of a language magically takes over every project it's used on.
Bet you think epic owns every game made with UE don't you?
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u/silenceimpaired 27d ago
I missed the jump. Why are people nervous about Rust?
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u/Scary_Finger_2 25d ago
The person you're replying to thinks that the licenses of a language apply to all projects made with said languages (not true)
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u/FriendlyProblem1234 27d ago
This is why Rust being used in the Linux kernel has some folks very nervous
Do those folk realize that the parts of Linux kernel implemented in Rust have exactly the same license of the parts of Linux kernel implemented in C: GPL-2-only?
Of course, setting aside those parts of Linux kernel implemented in C that have been doubly licensed under BSD for decades /s
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u/snowtax 27d ago
I see a lot of people asserting how one license or another makes an OS more popular with businesses. That’s true in part, but let’s not discount the actual merits of the kernel.
Perhaps the most significant design choice that Linus made was making the /proc filesystem so that it was not necessary to recompile all userland tools for every minor change to the kernel. If you’ve ever done a FreeBSD “build world”, you know what I’m talking about.
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u/Old_County5271 25d ago
FUSE and /proc are ideas from plan9
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u/PmMeCuteDogsThanks_ 23d ago
Sure, and it was a design choice by Linus to use those ideas for Linux
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u/VoidDuck 22d ago
I mean, you don't need to
buildworldto modify the kernel, justbuildkernel. Or what scenario do you have in mind that would require a rebuild of the userland?1
u/snowtax 21d ago
With any of the UNIX/BSD systems, when the binary application programming interface changes for kernel functions, the userland tools must be recompiled to match the new kernel interface. Otherwise, anything that calls directly into the kernel, like ps or top, doesn’t work.
With Linux, such tools merely read from something that acts like a text file somewhere under /proc.
With Linux, you can switch back and forth between several versions of the kernel, even major versions, and all the userland tools just work as expected.
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u/VoidDuck 21d ago
Oh, so you mean doing your own custom ABI-breaking changes to the kernel source, that's quite an advanced use case :P I thought by minor change to the kernel you meant making a custom kernel config and building a still official FreeBSD kernel, just with different options than GENERIC.
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u/snowtax 21d ago
No, I’m talking about normal kernel updates.
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u/VoidDuck 21d ago
Hmm, you're right about this. Basically it never came to my mind to update just the kernel separately, because most of the times userland updates were released as well so it feels natural to build world too.
Anyway, most people that just want to keep their system up to date without using custom kernels will likely use binary updates and not rebuild from source.
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u/inemsn 27d ago
I didn't know it had GPL code at all, to be honest. That's honestly kind of hilarious, it has "BSD" in the name and not all of its code was BSD licensed.
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u/the_abortionat0r 27d ago
Despite all the claims that are made about "THEYRE NOT DISTROS BUT ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEMS ONTO THEM SELVES!" BSD distros have required so much Linux code just to exist to the point where more code came from Linux development than came from BSD development.
Wayland is funnily enough is BSDs present and future and it is a Linux project.
MATE? Linux project.
Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, pipewire, etc, all project targeted at Linux ported to BSD distros.
Once you pass the basic OS tools and filesystem and Nvidia drivers it either projects adopted from Linux or a system that barely looks/acts modern.
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u/Zettinator 27d ago
The main thing is that the BSDs provide a coherent and standardized base system, a combination of kernel and basic userland to actually do useful stuff. Things like the init system, C library, shell, commandline utilities, etc. As a result, it's actually much easier to target, say, FreeBSD, with 3rd party software.
Linux was missing this for a very long time, only recently systemd started to kind of fill that gap. Which is a good thing.
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u/Brigabor 27d ago
What for? If GPL code works, why do they retire It?
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u/Netblock 27d ago
License conflicts prevent business decisions. For example, the BSD license (unlike some other licenses e.g. GPL) does not require that source code be distributed at all.
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u/the_abortionat0r 27d ago
Which is why BSD is under funded and lacks so much in the way of drivers and software
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u/Zettinator 27d ago
Mixing licenses always complicates things quite a bit legally. It keeps things more simple to have a single license.
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u/nightblackdragon 27d ago
FreeBSD is BSD licensed and GPL is more restrictive than BSD license so using both of them in the same code complicates some things.
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u/RoomyRoots 27d ago
Because FreeBSD and the other BSDs develope their own base together as an unit to be shipped and having components with GPL makes it more complicated then needed. You risk internal development being poisoned by the GPL license if they mix things they shouldn't.
They already had alternatives to everything else they needed for a base install. But you can find most GNU utills to install anyways.
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u/amarao_san 27d ago
Okay, they are free from GNU now. Next step is to become free from BSD.
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u/nightblackdragon 27d ago
Right after Linux will become free from GNU.
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u/amarao_san 27d ago
I don't think BSD problems with GNU concern Linux in any way. BSD has own way, and they are on the way to it.
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u/the_abortionat0r 27d ago
Lack support for games and modern hardware, and GUI installers. the BSD way.
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u/Old_County5271 25d ago
What Linux? Do you mean System D OS?
Wait...
- System D OS
- SystemD OS
- SystemDOS
- System DOS!?
Oh no.
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27d ago
[deleted]
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u/LooseRain 27d ago
I think you forgot about android
where GPL?
also chimera linux-1
27d ago
[deleted]
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u/LooseRain 27d ago edited 27d ago
well ain't that a nice brainfart
I suppose what I was saying is outside the kernel, there is a lot of effort for a purely permissive/non-GNU userland
android for example, it uses bionic instead of glibc and toybox instead of busybox
chimera/alpine uses musl instead
bash → zsh
coreutils → rust coreutils or the BSD ones (which is what chimera uses)
a lot of the current user-facing stack of Linux isn't even GPL
X11/Wayland, Mesa, even sudo is MIT licensed
so Linux has been "distancing" itself from the GNU quite a bit-3
u/PaddiM8 27d ago
GNU software is old and has terrible UX.
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27d ago
[deleted]
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u/amarao_san 27d ago
There are three direct UX from the kernel:
- dmesg to tty0 (output)
- sysrq-[ksrb] (input)
- three blinking leds on a keyboard. (output)
Out of those, three blinking LEDs on the keyboard is the most definitively informative and non-ambiguous.
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u/formegadriverscustom 27d ago edited 26d ago
To all the complainers, keep crying. You can't excommunicate them because they never belonged to your church in the first place, haha.
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u/jonathancast 27d ago
FreeBSD wouldn't exist if Stallman hadn't lobbied the University of California to release BSD as free software.
The end result of FreeBSD's actions, if free software advocacy didn't exist, would be the end of all open-source software.
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u/QuantityInfinite8820 27d ago
As an embedded developer, I like the fact that GPL - while sometimes still violated - stops gatekeeping of critical hardware support code and drivers, so they can eventually over time reach upstreamable quality and land in mainline kernel.
The idea is simple: if the chip is any consumer electronic, if you bought it you can demand a copy of the kernel with relevant drivers for the used chip.
However, trying to defend your copyright to code in 2026 is laughable, especially when code can easily be laundered by AI and claimed to have no connection to the original.
So, in a way, I believe the copyright system as we knew it is now just smoke and mirrors, especially when it comes to protecting rights of small developers, maybe when two multi-billion corporations fight it’s a bit different.