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Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

> free of the cancerous GPL, under a permissive MIT licence

Is this attitude common in the Haiku community? I was interested in checking it out but seeing this sort of rhetoric is discouraging.

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I can't say I speak for the “Haiku community” short of being friends with some of the developers and hanging in the IRC channel, but … no that's not a common attitude. Haiku prefers non-copyleft licenses, but doesn't avoid the GPL like cancer. Heck the default compiler is GCC (and will be for the foreseeable future) and the web browser uses WebKit.

That's good to know—thanks! Also good to hear that there are modern browsers available for Haiku :) I think I'll try it out on my old netbook.

There was a lot of effort a couple years ago to fully port WebKit including HTML5 video, audio, etc. NetSurf also runs on Haiku, if you want something lighter weight but with enough rendering support for most sites.

That's just reality. In general the GPL is perceived extremely negatively. Almost every company I've worked for has had strict audits to ensure nothing we do or even previously worked on has touched anything potentially GPL.

If you're writing software for fun, enjoy seeing it being used, and still want attribution you licence it under the MIT or BSD, not the GPL. Many people get polarized on the topic and there are many discussion on stackoverflow and around where people seek or design MIT-like, GPL-incompatible licence specifically. Likewise, the GPL has its own cult following.

Regardless of personal opinions, few if any commercial entities willing want to work with the GPL.

The linux kernel proves you wrong.

Not to mention uboot, busybox, etc.

It does not, at all. Working with the only available option is not the same thing as wanting to work with it.

Read the mailing list and driver discussions. This conversation is repeated twice a week. They HATE working around the GPL.

That doesn't really answer my question. I've seen this flame war before and am not really interested in fighting it again, hence my asking whether it comes up a lot in Haiku-land.

I guess a better way to start a conversation would be to point at all the effort and argumentation wasted over where the line between GPLed kernel modules and non-GPLed kernel modules is in the Linux kernel, as well as runtime disadvantages in some cases. The efforts to get ZFS encryption on Linux are a good recent example of this problem: they had to port the in-kernel crypto implementation from Illumnos (basically OpenSolaris) even though the Linux kernel has a perfectly good implementation of AES-GCM that would've worked without bloating the kernel modules.

Add to that the resistance to forming stable ABIs (and sometime APIs) in part to push everyone to not only license any kernel module as GPL, but to also commit it to the one true kernel sources, and I think there's at least a discussion worth having. But definitely not one to be started with "cancerous GPL".

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