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Comment by cyphar | Hacker News Reader

GNU was created on the basis of the GPL. It's not an accident that the "GNU stack had the GPL", it was a plan from the beginning to create a system which people could use in freedom. The toolchain would not exist if Stallman hadn't made the decision that user freedom was something he should work towards. And we wouldn't have any free software without GNU, because that's what the world was heading towards in the 70s and 80s. BSD would still be proprietary, since Stallman talked to Berkeley to convince the developers to release their improvements to Unix.

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>GNU was created on the basis of the GPL. It's not an accident that the "GNU stack had the GPL", it was a plan from the beginning to create a system which people could use in freedom.

The accident was that the plan was conceived by Stallman and involved GNU/GPL.

What I'm saying is a similar plan with BSD/MIT licenses, if it was initiated by another guy first, would be just as good.

In other words that the reason GNU/OSS got that far was that they provided software people needed at the right time -- not because they were GPL as opposed to BSD licensd.

What makes you so sure that, had the GNU stack been BSD/MIT licensed and as popular, that Microsoft etc. would not have come out with products featuring the same software but with proprietary extensions and closed licenses?

None of those things makes the original software unavailable to use.

>What makes you so sure that, had the GNU stack been BSD/MIT licensed and as popular, that Microsoft etc. would not have come out with products featuring the same software but with proprietary extensions and closed licenses?

Was makes you so sure that it would matter? The original software will still be there and free for any modification one would want to do.

A majority (if not most) of the contributions to the Linux kernel come from developers paid to do so by the likes of Intel, Google, IBM etc. [1]. Do you have any reason to believe that said for-profit companies would have contributed to the same degree to a BSD/MIT licensed Linux kernel instead of focusing on a Linux kernel with proprietary extensions under a closed license?

[1] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/infographics/who-w...

Do you have reason to believe that they wouldn't have, or that they would do so, if it were GPL3+ licensed?

Apple famously doesn't provide any "recent" GNU tools because they're GPL3+ licensed, when they were previously GPL2.x and less restrictive.

Do you have reason to believe that they wouldn't have

Maybe, as a data point: how many of the manufacturers' contributions to Linux are MIT licensed, so that they can be picked up by *BSD as well?

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