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Comment by saynsedit | Hacker News Reader

Something that isn't transparent in this discussion is the fact that Linux is extremely corporate now.

By that I mean, the vast majority of contributions are sponsored by corporations.

Both Linus and Greg know that. They are keenly aware that if Linux takes a hardline GPL approach it will gain the reputation of being unfriendly to corporations. That perception will kill Linux in the long run.

When they say they "Care about Linux more than GPL" they are really saying they care about corporate Linux since non-corporate Linux virtually doesn't exist anymore.

I have nothing against that and honestly I think they have more clear opinions due to their positions as top-level maintainers. I just think the motivations and incentives behind their opinions should be clear to more people.

The people's Linux is virtually dead. People need to eat. An analysis of that phenomenon would be interesting as well but is beyond the scope of this discussion.

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This seems to be an extremely glass-half-full view.

The other view is that what would have otherwise been "non-people's" OS contributions now belong to the people. All these "corporate" coders are putting code out in the open. Isn't this better than everybody working on closed-source kernels?

Those that are violating the GPL would have done what instead? License a closed-source kernel? Use a BSD and not contribute back?

Even though corporate Linux may not always co-align with my interests as a user, it seems to align at least as much as any non-corporate dev who's contributing to Linux. I'm only one person, but the GPL projects that don't have full-time or at least paid maintainers seem to align with my interests as a user with the same or less frequency as the ones with a corporate maintainer.

So I'm not sure that corporate/non-corporate is a useful distinction for this.

>They are keenly aware that if Linux takes a hardline GPL approach it will gain the reputation of being unfriendly to corporations. That perception will kill Linux in the long run.

I'm not sure I agree with either of these statements, to be honest. Those corporations that are violating the license aren't contributing back to Linux anyway; so losing them won't kill Linux. And Google or other corporate Linux sponsors are not going to be scared away by having to conform to the GPL.

> Those corporations that are violating the license aren't contributing back to Linux anyway; so losing them won't kill Linux.

I don't think that's what the grandparent was worried about. If the kernel developers defend the GPL too ardently, some companies that currently contribute, or that are considering contribution, may be worried about violating the license and decide that it's in their best interests to avoid Linux altogether. I agree that it wouldn't actually kill Linux, but it could potentially do more harm than good by scaring away potential contributors that are a little more on the fence.

By that argument, every non-copyleft licensed codebase is "dead" with respect to the "people".

In reality, the opposite is true even though it burns up FSF folks. Linux is alive and well. You can download, read, edit and contribute back to the kernel for free. Maybe your patches won't be accepted, but the license doesn't guarantee that they will be anyway.

It is true that you may periodically experience a scofflaw that sells you a router that hides some kernel code, but this should only bother you on philosophical grounds. The vendor has no obligation to allow you to "repair" or modify the device. The vendor is under no obligation to accept a patch from you if you find a flaw. Putting linux in a device does not grant the end user any specific right to change the device's behavior. People seem to be confusing "hackable" with "has GPL code". A shitty router with linux code will probably remain a shitty router.

I can see why the FSF and SFC might be throwing a fit; Clang and LLVM can replace GCC, and Linus isn't at all militant about license enforcement. The effective power of the FSF is in rapid decline.

> In reality, the opposite is true even though it burns up FSF folks. Linux is alive and well. You can download, read, edit and contribute back to the kernel for free. Maybe your patches won't be accepted, but the license doesn't guarantee that they will be anyway.

This isn't untrue, but it does not take away the main point: the community that drives the development agenda and dictates priorities is no longer a community of independent programmers (in the broad sense of the word; many contributions used to come from people who were hired by commercial entities, but they were still relatively small groups, and contributions were limited to small pieces that were specifically interesting for their small-ish employers: a driver for this or that network card, improvements in this routing protocol and so on).

This is no longer the case, and the development agenda of the Linux kernel is almost completely dictated by large players, at the expense of small ones and, to a large degree, individual users.

> at the expense of small ones and, to a large degree, individual users.

Is that a real expense at all though? I would argue that, empirically, it is zero. As in zero evidence of contributions to Linux detracting from my needs as a small player and user.

Every community is going to drive things in their "own" direction, and that direction is largely dictated by use by those developers. If it were a difference, an expense on the people, there would be a community with differing views of what the kernel should be doing. They could contribute code towards their ends, or fork. Given that there is practically zero interest in this, I would say that it's fairly clear that a so-called "corporate Linux," in the form of largely corporate code contributions, has come at zero expense to the "people."

> People seem to be confusing "hackable" with "has GPL code".

Well, to be fair, wasn't the GPLv3 created to make those two strongly correlated? I know Linux is gpl 2, and Linus is publically against v3, but I get the feeling this was considered a large loophole in the spirit of the license.

You answered your own question - linux is GPLv2 and always will be. It will never be GPLv3; Linus hates GPLv3.

GPLv2 doesn't grant you a right to hack, period.

The companies know what they're getting into.

Also, one of the advantages of the GPL (I think there are disadvantages too, but that's another post) is that all those companies can contribute without the fear that one of them will 'defect' and run off with things, perhaps hiring up enough developers to make their fork the 'best' one.

I am so sick and tired of this meme that, unless you allow businesses to break the law, you're being 'unfriendly to business.'

I can not imagine that Linus is sold to corporations. IMHO, his stance is that he wants: - Linux to be working well on all the new hardware - he wants open source for all the code he wants to hack. - he does not care if some firmware is closed source as long as this does not harm Linux behavior.

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