Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.
Not only can I imagine, but I lived in that world.
> Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.
Linux was excellent before ... Google even existed.
Linux was a really nice hobby before then.
I saw about a 35% speedup on a "make -j 3" back then; there was a lot of coarse-grained locking still (BKL), and the hardware wasn't good to begin with.
I'm pretty sure IBM had nothing to do with Linux; the name that comes up in my mind when I think back to that time is "Alan Cox", not "IBM".
I did contract work for infomine.com in 1994; it ran on Linux.
And LineageOS would probably have a hard time existing because the manufacturers would not be forced to release their kernels.
We might have proprietary kernels optimised for Intel CPUs, too.
The FSF might also have decided to continue the development of Hurd, or someone to write improvements to a BSD kernel under a GPL license.
We might be talking about the Google-Sun duopoly today instead of the Wintel duopoly today had Linux not existed.
There were things that Solaris was better at in 1998: big iron things, NUMA things, fault-tolerance things, what we now call "observability". (I still don't have a good equivalent for pstack on Linux!) But Linux was enormously better at many other things, including, most crucially, networking.
That was about the time the Top500 list started morphing into a list of the top 500 Beowulfs.
> If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.
It just means you can do whatever you want with your copy, within the scope of whatever realm you control.
At the last FOSDEM there was a talk on "open source under attack" claiming that anything other than permissive licensing represents an attack on open source:
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/osi/
Two of the three presenters were lawyers for Google and Facebook, two giant surveillance companies with absolutely closed SaaS silo ecosystems. Evidently the "spirit of open source" is free labor for surveillance capitalism and pop-up SaaS products that monetize open source with paywalled APIs and give nothing back.
FOSDEM != OSI, but there's a common DNA here.
Let's face it, when the biggest contributor to the Linux kernel is Microsoft, the open source movement has very little to do with RMS' ideals.
Either way, to your statement about "the movement", I think it's important to keep in mind that a lot of what passes for hacker culture today is quite different from where those two hail from. How much overlap is there between the Tao of Programming and modern web development, for example?
Whether that's good, bad, or just a value-neutral observation is pretty much up to the beholder.
ESR talked up his role and theories about how open source worked, but his writing was the main thing that he contributed. His attempts at contributing actual code did not have nearly the same impact. Nor has his description of how open source worked actually had the same impact.
Even the OSI definition owes more to Ian Murdock (the "ian" in "debian") than it does to ESR.
However if RMS and Brian Fox had not single-handedly set about reimplementing the Unix toolsystem back in the mid-1980s, the world would today be different.
As much as RMS annoyed people by saying that Linux should be called GNU/Linux, he had a point. Linus contributed the kernel, but most of what people called Linux at the time was actually written by the FSF.