Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

> "around the same time, free software organizations were starting to successfully sue companies who were using free software but not complying with the license. so big companies, like Apple, saw new restrictions coming in at the same time as more aggressive enforcement, and said “well shit, we want to base our software on these handy convenient tools like GCC but we can’t use GPLv3 software while keeping our hardware and software as locked together as we’d like.” so they started pouring money into a new C compiler, LLVM, that was instead open source."

This is only half the story.

The other half is that GCC is a monolithic app, built in a style that makes it hard to contribute to. GCC was (maybe it still is), ironically, defective by design in order to force companies to extend GCC, instead of building plugins that could be distributed as proprietary.

Either way, LLVM's license is still Free Software, still Open Source. And LLVM's permissive license is actually proof that you don't necessarily need a copyleft license to get companies to contribute. And we've got a whole ecosystem of such projects built with permissive licenses, hello BSD/OS.

Free Software and Open Source never meant just copyleft. That's a misconception.

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> "what really killed free software? ... in a word, capitalism."

It's funny that the author says that, because it is capitalism that enabled Free Software to exist in the first place.

Copyleft wouldn't be possible without the existing copyright law.

Also the biggest contributors to FOSS projects have been companies. Not individuals in their spare time, not the state, but companies motivated by profit. Just like how technological innovations are often driven by companies motivated by profit. And yes, we could have a discussion about perverse incentives, and how we could avoid that.

But I was born in communism, I know how not living in capitalism is actually like, and unless people can suggest actual solutions, instead of a rant inspired by Marx & friends, we've got nothing to talk about. I wish articles with such bad takes would start with the conclusion, so I wouldn't waste my time.

>Either way, LLVM's license is still Free Software, still Open Source. And LLVM's permissive license is actually proof that you don't necessarily need a copyleft license to get companies to contribute. And we've got a whole ecosystem of such projects built with permissive licenses, hello BSD/OS.

It's also enables proprietary extensions, easily enabling companies to make compilers for their proprietary languages, see CUDA. That seems pretty contrary to the mission of free software.

Also, just curious, how many patches have FreeBSD and co. actually received back from Sony and Apple in the past few years? They still seem to be struggling to add features to the point of begging for 802.11ac support.

> capitalism that enabled Free Software to exist in the first place.

No, it did not. If you knew the history of FOSS, then you would know that for several decades, every major tech company strongly opposed it and was terrified of it. GNU and Linux were started by programmers and academics who wanted to work on software with other people and share the benefits in the open. They were not started by individuals interested in making a profit or getting an IPO. FOSS was not started by entrepreneurs or any company; it was a cooperative, not a competitive, effort by people who wanted something better and who realized that cooperation/sharing work would be helpful in that goal. You could say their goal was to communally create software ;)

> Copyleft wouldn't be possible without the existing copyright law.

True, but you are not digging into the core issue here. If there was no capitalism (i.e. no companies seeking to maximize profits/valuation), why would there need to be copyright law in its present form? Copyright law exists because companies want to minimize costs, thus leading to incentives to steal other people’s IP for their own ends. Copyleft is a solution within this system; if no profit motive existed, then there would be no need for all of this defensive licensing.

> Also the biggest contributors to FOSS projects have been companies

As stated before, not for the first couple decades of FOSS. Do you know anything about Microsoft’s historical relationship/commentary about Linux? In the immediate present, your statement is true. That’s why it is described in the article. This is the problem. Corporations have co-opted the FOSS movement and used it to build closed source projects/SaaS products that they alone control and benefit from. The goal of free software was co-opted into free software on unfree platforms (e.g. AWS).

> But I was born in communism, I know how not living in capitalism is actually like

This is a classic false dichotomy. There are more options than simply capitalism and the 20th century implementations of communism. Even if you reject all forms of communism, communism != !capitalism. That is why ‘anti-capitalism’ is a separate word. Capitalism can be critiqued or replaced; it is not inevitable or unchangeable.

A corporation started the Mozilla project that they are fawning over. Another corporation bought them out, and released the source.

This is more twenty-something edgelord 'life isn't fair' communist who clearly has never lived, or known anyone who lives(d) under communisim.

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