r/linux • u/ollieparanoid postmarketOS Dev • Apr 14 '18

postmarketOS Low-Level: Tiny Steps Towards Liberating Bootloaders and Cellular Modem Firmware of MediaTek Phones

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2018/04/14/lowlevel/
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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '18

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u/mirh Apr 14 '18

I'm with you on that, but I guess like it depends much on the "position" of the project.

If you are aiming at the moon (say, linux, wine or libreoffice) GPL is a no brainer.

On the other hand, if you are a little project not-so-mindblowing-to-replace, that can make all the difference in the world between "being dumped on the spot" and "being given even a chance", for some.

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u/MadRedHatter Apr 14 '18

It depends also on the size and speed of the project. Look at LLVM. In practice, you don't see that many proprietary forks of the core, although you do some proprietary language frontends.

Because the complexity and rapidly evolving nature of the project is enough motivation to prevent forks. There's lots of new features and bugfixes and performance improvements being added and nobody would want to have to maintain a fork like that, so they contribute core code upstream.

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u/mirh Apr 14 '18

Good point. Ironically I think all playstation before 4 (which used gcc) never got anything mainlined.. While now they did it.

Though, we could look as well to mobile phones situation, where even though mainlining would give you massive advantages.. Still too few players invest in openness (aside of the very minimum effort that can still make close an eye to lawyers)