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Comment by mundanevoice | Hacker News Reader

Except BSD even being older than Linux never really took off either in Desktop space or Servers.

Thanks AT&T suit and the MIT licensing, lots of companies use BSD derived OSes without giving anything back.

Linux only took off thanks to SGI, IBM, HP, Cray seeing value reducing costs from their own in-house systems to something else.

Agree with your points about the suit and Licensing.

> Linux only took off thanks to SGI, IBM, HP, Cray seeing value reducing costs from their own in-house systems to something else.

This seems unfair, Linux took off because it constantly kept getting improved and has more and more developers contributing to it. It didn't only take off because it was cheap, but it kept on improving. Also, the Elitist mindsets of some BSD devs and community go back to harm it. Try contributing to OpenBSD or FreeBSD and compare it with how approachable and relatively easy it is to contribute to Linux is.

Also, it's the fault of BSD's to not adopt or change to a better License at getting contributions back to its mainstream.

I also have major objections to calling anything more secure. No software is secure, each one of them has bugs. Some are discovered because more and more people use it. It's not like BSDs never had any CVEs ever.

It is not unfair, because the majority of "developers contributing to it" are on those company payrolls, 8h a day during a full week.

It would be just another BSD or Minix if it would be only university students and weekend coders working on it, and we would all keep using Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, Tru64, Ultrix....

As for security issues, it helps that Linus is against disclosing security bugs as such.

> It is not unfair, because the majority of "developers contributing to it" are on those company payrolls, 8h a day during a full week.

This is overwhelmingly true now, but it wasn't always.

Which is the reason why Linux moved beyond yet another UNIX clone hobby project.

I still remember how it was when I was getting distributions via Walnut Creek CDROMs.

As per Wikipedia, IBM, Compaq and Oracle started contributing in some form around 1998.

I guess we could look at commits history to see when IBM and friends actually started to provide features.

> It is not unfair, because the majority of "developers contributing to it" are on those company payrolls, 8h a day during a full week. Why don't the devs at those company contribute to BSD then? Care to reflect on this?

MIT license, they don't need to.

How much code do you think they got back from Sony, Apple, companies selling routers with BSD on them?

Even Google prefers to build their own OS from scratch with MIT license (Fuchsia) than keep on using Linux for that effort. They already reduced GPL use to the bare minimum on Android by removing gcc.

Then there was the whole suit which made most companies loose interest to be involved with BSD.

FreeBSD uses BSD License, no? Or am I missing something here? https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license.html

BSD and MIT licenses are almost interchangeable regarding requirements to the code.

They even appear as MIT/BSD in many projects.

Citations/Examples, please? I always thought these are different.

Simple Google search.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/217/what-are-...

Relevant part:

"o what both the 2-clause BSD license and the MIT license have in common are:

    Permits use
    Permits redistribution
    Permits redistribution with modification
    Provision to retain the copyright notice and warranty disclaimer

In addition the MIT license also explicitly allows:

    merging
    publishing
    sublicensing
    selling

However, all these freedoms are implied by the BSD license, because all these activities can be considered "use" and/or "redistribution" of the software.

The practical differences between the 2-clause BSD license and the MIT license are marginal. Which one to pick is mostly up to personal taste. Especially considering that both licenses are considered compatible, so you can take code under one license and use it in a project under the other, as long as you keep the license text around."

Yocto has files with such dual license.

https://git.congatec.com/yocto/meta-openembedded/blob/fido/m...

What are you talking about? BSD sees plenty of use, for its support of zfs, dtrace, and jails alone.

Unless you're heavily invested in the Linux kernel and Linux-only tech, I'd advise to keep your software running on the BSDs as well as Linux to avoid monocultures in your own best interest. The strength of F/OSS is in giving you choice, eg. by providing two (or more) interchangeable, excellent O/S's and compiler suites.

I am talking about comparable usage. Do not get me wrong. And it's best for everyone if BSD succeeds because then we have a choice. My pet peeve is that it is incredibly difficult to contribute to BSDs (say OpenBSD) compared to Linux. F/OSS project runs on community contributions and thrives solely on basis of that. I hope they open the process up more so that more and more users contribute to it.

Also, essentials things like graphics drivers etc, work properly so that the devs like us start using it as a daily driver and contribute to it's usage.

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