Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

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> On the contrary, the claim is that without the GPL, commercial UNIXes would still be around.

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.

Exactly because I see LLVM as an example, given that not everyone using it contributes 100% back upstream.

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.

> 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.

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.

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