I don't consider the improvements that ARM, Apple, Sony, CodePlay, NVidia, AMD, among others, don't upstream due to IP considerations or revealing of hardware secrets, niche.
Personally I don't care, but I bet many FOSS anti-GPL advocates will eventually care.
As mentioned I don't care, after university my main UNIX platforms were HP-UX, Aix and Solaris with their respective system compilers anyway.
Linux is already getting replacement candidates in IoT space via Zephyr, NuttX, mbed, RTOS, Azure RTOS, and who knows if Fuchsia will eventually get out of the lab, so be it.
No, for practical purposes, there is not. You can only enforce delivery of the source when a product based on GPL software gets delivered. But of course companies, which create software, know about this. Any usage of GPL software for delivered products only happens after the decision to publish the created software has been made. In doubt, companies tend to not use GPL software as part of deliveries.
GPL advocates try to claim otherwise of course.
I keep wondering if Microsoft opens up the Windows Kernel ( And Kernel only ), would it change the landscape much.
On Android Linux is an implementation detail, most of it isn't exposed to userspace, not even on the NDK as Linux APIs aren't part of the stable interface specification.
And ART is being ported to run on top of Fuchsia as well (https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/fuchsia), so...
_ph_ meant to write "This way, they can at least upstream everything which doesn't fall under these restrictions." (note the deleted comma before "which"), i.e., they can at least upstream something instead of nothing.
So the current options are: these companies don't open-source anything (which is what you get with GPL), or they open-source something (which is what you get with BSD, and in practice they open source a lot).
The claim that with the GPL they would open source _everything_ isn't true; they would just not open source anything instead. I also don't see any current legal framework that would allow them to opens ource everything without loosing a significant competitive advantage, and am very skeptical that such a framework can be conceived.
Since I am a commercial software user for most part, this is more of a philosophical question than anything else.
Lets see how long Linux will hold out against the new generation of IoT OSes all being MIT/BSD based, and what the bazaar will get out of them.
Or how long GCC will hold, when all major OSes use clang as their default compiler, and then how the baazar will go from there on.
I'm not sure this is true. See LLVM as an example. GCC existing and being GPL only meant that, e.g., Apple couldn't properly use it. Apple could have bought LLVM and kept it private, or develop their own proprietary solution and not make it open source, or fork the open source project into a private project and never contribute anything back, etc. There were many options.
Open source software has always existed, if anything, the GPL demonstrated that a particular open source model does not work well for a big part of the industry, while it works well for other parts, and non industrial usage.
Linux being successful seems incidental to it being GPL'ed, at least to me. Other open source OSes, like BSD 4.x, have also been quite successfull (powering the whole MacOS and iOS ecosystems, after a significant frankenstransform into Mach). Maybe Linux would have been even more succesfull with a BSD license, or maybe it would be dead.
I wouldn't consider BSD layer from NeXTSTEP an example of success for BSD's market adoption, given that not everything goes upstream, by now it hardly represents the current state of affairs.
If anything it represents what would have happened without Linux, all major UNIX vendors would continue to take pieces of BSD and not necessarily contribute anything back.
Its essentially what happens if (1) only one company wants to use the open source product, and (2) the open source product has a tiny community where no development happens.
In that scenario, there is no benefit from anybody forking the open source project (a private company or an individual) for upstreaming anything. It just costs time, but adds no value for them.
Linux and GCC never was like this (not even early days), and I think this is independent of its license. LLVM never was like this either.
In fact, there are many private companies that maintain a GCC fork, like arm, and due to the GPL need to provide its sources with a copy, which they do. But they are not required to reintegrate anything upstream, which they very often don't, and ARM support in gcc-arm from ARM is much better than on GCC upstream. A volunteer can't merge (review, rebase, ...) a 200k LOC patch on their free time, so once these forks diverge, its essentially game over. You'll need a team of volunteers equal in man power to what the private company provides.
So while the license affects which companies can use an open source project in practice, and what they can or cannot contribute. The GPL2 and GPL3 licenses are not a good tool to actually allow everybody to benefit from those contributions.
Maybe a GPL4 could require companies to upstream and get their contributions accepted, but IMO that would just get even less companies to use those projects.
BSD is Older than Linux:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Berkeley_Softwa...
Ah and there was that small legal issue back in the early 90's.
BTW: Market-share means nothing, you know Android is NOT Gnu/Linux
EDIT: Maybe your too young..but do you remember that SCO/Microsoft thingy with Linux
I surely remember it, except BSD did not ever had anyone like IBM jumping into the battle. :)
As for being young, thanks for the compliment
> ...as anyone coding since mid-80's....
And as information, during the early days, the Internet ran on commercial UNIXes.
They did not...the opposite is true, they shat their pants because shortly before they said "yes" to Linux, that's why SCO came...first time you had really big money (IBM) behind Linux, please don't change the timeline...it's kind of important.
>And as information, during the early days, the Internet ran on commercial UNIXes.
What do you wanna say with that? During the early days of Smartphones they ran on commercial OS's??
RIOT OS is LGPLv2.1.