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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

But what does that gain anyone? If the Linux/GNU ecosystem were re-licensed to MIT/BSD/Apache2, what would be lost?

In practice: there are many companies that built interesting networking products on top of BSD kernels and had no compulsion to release the source, and meanwhile the performance of Linux's networking stack slowly beat it, because companies were working upstream.

"Have no compulsion to release the source" -- reminds me of the interview on the Bryan Lunduke show with a FreeBSD maintainer who talked about Juniper, Comcast, EMC, and Netflix engineers who contribute back a lot of code to FreeBSD, just not the code that specifically makes their work a competitive advantage for their employer, a definition that changes over time. I might be conflating the Lunduke interview with something else but I thought that the Netflix engineers that build their ISP-level caching servers ultimately decided that none of it constituted a proprietary advantage so they released it all. Had the project been based on closed source this wouldn't be an option -- and GPL was out the question all the way unless it was known up-front there would be nothing that could give the makers a competitive advantage.

Programmers have to eat; permissive licensing is the best compromise between openness and needing to make a living. History has shown that eventually the code comes out rather than being socked away in proprietary hell.

although you make some good points, sadly, the permissive license structure is arguably enabling a new Feudalism, at least in the West, with seasoned programmers reduced to share-cropping, while finance rules the castle (and its dining halls).

Permissive license structure for computer programs (or, for that matter, anything especially about computer programs) has nothing to do with that, it's just the normal labor-capital relationship of capitalism. There is, literally, no conceivable software licensing regime that avoids that effect, as long as the broader economic system is predominantly capitalist.

For the most part, I don't disagree with you, but it's also the case that Linux has gotten many contributions from companies that decided that they were okay with being required to give source to customizations they redistribute. Both models work, and both models have downsides.

It's also true that Linux has gotten contributions from companies like Facebook (and Netflix?) that are not redistributing Linux itself and so are not actually under any compulsion to release sources.

I've seen enough cases of private contributions to BSD code not getting released, even when they're clearly not a competitive advantage anymore, that I don't think waiting it out is reliable. There's a particular vendor product we used at my last company that was based on an extension to some FreeBSD kernel code. In the next version, they switched to a userspace app, it sucked, and I'm pretty sure they never released their old kernel implementation. (In fact there are plenty of well-known cases of license-violating private contributions to GPL'd code being a pain to compel through the legal process.)

> History has shown that eventually the code comes out rather than being socked away in properietary hell.

When people talk about reforming copyright there is usually a comment about GPL with a standard answer: copyright escrow. If we just have rules in places that guaranties that the code eventually comes out rather than being socked away in properietary hell then 99% of the purpose of copyleft has been served.

Last Friday in tech news there was an entry about a deal between a DRM company and a game company that expires, so "owners" of the game can no longer install the game. Proprietary code for games do not usually come out, so there is some real worry that the games are now closed down forever.

I wonder how supportive Juniper, Comcast, EMC, and Netflix would be to copyright escrow.

A number of proprietary extensions to the ecosystem that are never contributed back.

Right, just like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Sony, Netflix, Juniper and everyone else who uses BSD software never, ever gives their additions back.

Oh wait... they do!

Tell me where I can download the source to nVidia's LLVM-based shader compiler.

Only bits and pieces when they feel like it.

Apple throws things over the wall after taking it and hiding it. They don't "give back" in any meaningful sense.

I'm still bitter at how they murdered KHTML.

(Before someone comments "But KHTML is LGPL!": I know. That's the point. The GPL doesn't have these problems. The LGPL is too weak to be meaningful.)

> I'm still bitter at how they murdered KHTML.

Murdered? Thanks in large part to the work Apple did to transform KHTML into WebKit, WebKit and its derivatives (like Blink) have utterly dominated the browser marketplace. I have a hard time reconciling your characterization of Apple's action with the facts.

Murdered. They forked it in a way that couldn't be upstreamed (they waited a year and change before releasing source, when doing so releasing it as undocumented garbage), and made their contributions in a way that allowed it to be closed.

GPL doesn't forbid forking.

Safari would have been released as free software if KHTML was GPL.

Apple wouldn't have based a product around it if it were GPL.

Which is fine, too! What happened wasn't, though.

> Which is fine, too!

Yes, we know that a certain subset of Free Software zealots prefer preventing non-Free software to promoting Free software.

> What happened wasn't, though.

Why exactly is the creation of a set of F/OSS browser engine cores which have essentially completely extinguished the proprietary cores to dominate the space not “fine”?

There were already multiple good libre browser engines: KHTML, Gecko, and (kind of) the Tcl one.

Apple forked one in a hostile fashion, and later used it to release proprietary software.

A substantial volume of web browsers, including the largest two (Chrome, Safari), are proprietary software, directly because of this.

It made the WWW less free, and hurt users.

>A substantial volume of web browsers, including the largest two (Chrome, Safari), are proprietary software

I guess you are the 0.0001% of the internet who consider Chrome and Safari to be proprietary software, when it has an Open Source version freely available.

Safari is 100% proprietary and closed source, and certain parts of WebKit are as well. Chrome isn’t completely open source either, though to a lesser extent.

Netflix kernel guy here... Off the top of my head, we (Netflix) have contributed the following over the last few years to FreeBSD:

- async sendfile

- rewrite of the pbuf system

- unmapped mbufs

- kernel TLS

- RACK TCP

- BBR TCP

- TCP high precision timer system (TCP pacer)

- various NUMA improvements, which allow us to stream in excess of 200Gb/s of TLS encrypted video traffic from a single server

- Metric tons of fixes

Contributing stuff back makes it easier to work with other folks, and makes our jobs easier. We merge from upstream FreeBSD-current every few weeks. The smaller the diff we carry forward, the easier our jobs are.

If everyone contribute back everything then the distinction between BSD and GPL would be indistinguishable. A zero diff would be easier work, and would make your job easier than a small diff. but since that is not the case there is an evidential balance between contributing back and keeping changes proprietary.

It would be nice in this kind of threads if both sides were just honest in presenting how things work. Companies will decide on contributing back BSD code based on competitive advantages of doing so. It is a business decision. They can reducing costs by having the code maintained by upstream and reduce integration costs, or they can get advantage over their competitors by keeping the code proprietary.

I see similar discussing when companies talk about paying taxes. The press releases will talk about contributing back to society and being responsible citizen, while at the same time employing lawyers who do "tax management" in order to pay as little tax as possible. It is true that they do contribute back with numbers that looks impressive, and paying some taxes is easier than paying no taxes, but a honest description would call it a calculated business decision that balance benefits and drawbacks between compliance and tax avoidance.

I would say there's a massive difference between contributing back code and paying taxes. Public companies have a FIDUCIARY duty to provide maximum value to shareholders, and that's been the "legal justification" for the FAANGs to engage in the "reverse Irish, Dutch sandwich" scheme to pay zero taxes. Meanwhile, shareholders don't care about code licensing as long as the company isn't giving away the secret sauce under F/OSS terms. Netflix dude above mentioned how much they contribute back; the "enlightened self-interest" of the BSD world encourages these companies to contribute as much as possible back to the project so their diffs in pulling down updates are minimal. If they go asshole and keep everything private they are making their own headache worse when updating or locking themselves in the past.

> FIDUCIARY duty to provide maximum value to shareholders

i’m not sure that’s exactly true is it? [0] or at least it seems quite murky (case-by-case, state-by-state) [1]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

[1] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5dc3f206-0fcc...

>If everyone contribute back everything then the distinction between BSD and GPL would be indistinguishable.

The difference here is Netflix can choose which part to contribute back. In most cases the CDN work is not their core competitive advantage, their Quality Content are. Which means Netflix can contribute back everything they have done.

Why is this being question being down-voted without explanation? I understand there are philosophical/religious implications to the question but it's still valid: what would you lose?

I didn't downvote, but my guess is that it's because there are well-known tradeoffs and no obvious answer, and asserting that there is no downside to one choice / making people re-argue well-understood benefits to one choice doesn't actually contribute to the conversation.

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