Comment by _abox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _abox | Hacker News Reader

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That link has been posted here many times already.

I use FreeBSD as a daily driver on my desktop. Very happy with it. My reasons to choose it were more that I feel like Linux has become a toy of big tech. If you look at the kernel contributions, most of them are from people working for all the big names. Linux has become Big Business and each company is trying to safeguard their interests in it. Linus is still in charge of the kernel officially but all the steering groups are dominated by big tech. Look at the Linux Foundation for instance: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/board-of-directors/ . These are not the kind of people you'd expect to lead 'free software', these are all boardroom types. Maybe Linux has outgrown the beardy hacker culture but I have not :P

Of course, Linux is not much worse for it... Yet. I think this is for 2 reasons: Linus' benevolent dictatorship, and the fact that they won't be able to agree on much given that these guys are all competitors. But in the long term I'm sure this will take its toll. For example, would these guys ever have approved the GPL-3? Everyone in business is pretty universally against it.

And in fact it's the very BSD license that makes big business shun FreeBSD. Which I think is a good thing. FreeBSD still feels like a grassroots development and as such I feel more in control. The excellent and consistent documentation and friendly community is another plus for me. And the combination of stable OS with rolling third-party software (but this is something that was also mentioned in the article). ZFS on Root is another one (though Ubuntu is now catching up to that).

> If you look at the kernel contributions, most of them are from people working for all the big names

Like hardware manufacturers? I thought getting commercial users to contribute to the kernel was desirable?

> For example, would these guys ever have approved the GPL-3?

Didn't Torvalds himself reject GPL-3?

> And in fact it's the very BSD license that makes big business shun FreeBSD

Now I'm really confused. Why would businesses not like the BSD license? And they don't like GPL-3 either? Is GPL-2 the goldilocks license for them?

> Like hardware manufacturers? I thought getting commercial users to contribute to the kernel was desirable?

Contribute to drivers, yes. Steer development of the kernel, no, IMO. The more they contribute, the more influence they gain. And a lot of the contributions are not hardware related at all.

> Didn't Torvalds himself reject GPL-3?

I don't know, I didn't follow this as I don't follow Linux news that closely anymore. I thought it was mainly about the way that it was introduced. But I think it's a much better license than GPL-2.

> Now I'm really confused. Why would businesses not like the BSD license? And they don't like GPL-3 either? Is GPL-2 the goldilocks license for them?

Businesses hate the BSD license because any code derived does not have to be open at all. So that means anything they contribute can be taken by their competitors and used in closed-source software. That's totally OK. Because of this there's only a few companies involved in BSD. Notably Netflix, the former Skype (before it was acquired by MS), and some smaller orgs like Netapp and iX that makes freenas/truenas.

Companies hate GPL-3 because their license gets revoked if a company uses its patents to attack GPLd software. It also stipulates some other things like that devices running GPL-3 software must also be open (e.g. no locked bootloaders etc). Very good things IMO. A lot of GPL-3's stipulations were triggered by real-world exploitation of free software. Examples: By TiVo (hence the name "anti-TiVoisation clause" for the open hardware thing). And the anti-patent clause was a direct result of Microsoft's patent attacks on Linux. No wonder Steve Ballmer hated the GPL-3 so much.

This is why Microsoft and most of the others hate it so much, they love giving open source lip service, but are not really open source companies. The GPL-2 gives them enough loopholes to get away with this. Many companies avoid GPL-3 licensed software at all costs, it was the driving force for bash not being updated (and replaced by zsh) on macOS for example.

Personally I think it would be better if FreeBSD was GPL-3d but BSD is not bad for me as a use that doesn't want too much corporate influence. After all, if a company makes a closed-source fork it doesn't impact me in any way. I won't use it anyway.

> Businesses hate the BSD license because any code derived does not have to be open at all. So that means anything they contribute can be taken by their competitors and used in closed-source software.

Isn't this why businesses love the BSD license?

They can take BSD-licensed code and do what they want with it and keep the end result closed.

This is why it powers the PlayStation.

I think you might be 100% incorrect with your supposition on businesses and BSD licensing!

Businesses love BSD licenses, because they can use the code for any purpose they need, whether internal use or building something and distributing it. No one can force them to share any part of their work, or even share anything.

Netflix, Juniper, Apple (and many others) all use BSD derived UNIX components, precisely for that. They contribute back what they want (and mainly what they do jot wish to maintain as a company secret).

GPL-3 is much more complex because it can /require/ you to share code. BSD licenses do not require you to share anything.

Businesses in general do not like ‘requirements’ like that even if only because they have to track them and ensure they do not break any licenses.

I work for a large financial services company, GPL-3 licensed software requires specific approval, AGPL is banned across the board (same as in Google). BSD and GPL-2 is fully permitted (as is MIT and all the other style licenses)

> Businesses hate the BSD license because any code derived does not have to be open at all.

That's the opposite of truth.

For example, Apple ships many BSD software on macOS, explicitly shuns updates for GPL software, and endorses the LLVM project from very early time exactly to avoid the GPL license of GCC.

Or take Google. Android, Kubernetes and Tensorflow are licensed under Apache. Chromium, V8 and GoLang are licensed under BSD.

Or take Microsoft. Typescript is licensed under Apache. VSCode is licensed under MIT. .Net Core are licensed under both Apache and MIT.

Companies choose Linux despite its GPL license, not because of it.

> Didn't Torvalds himself reject GPL-3?

Was the GPLv3 ever formally rejected? Isn't the problem that the Linux kernel was GPLv2 only before the GPLv3 existed, and by the time it did come out, there were too many contributors for there to be any hope of getting it changed?

Some googling around the issue suggests Linus pretty clearly rejects the principles of GPLv3.

https://www.linux.com/news/why-torvalds-sitting-out-gplv3-pr...

I know he isn't a fan of it. My point is just that his dislike of it isn't why Linux can't use it today.

To be honest that reads more like a list of complaints about how they didn't do the process the way he prefers, rather than criticism of the license itself.

The only point of actual criticism about the license that I see is that it is one way compatible with the Apache license. And the supposed ideology of wanting to absorb other licenses, though one could argue that the designers just wanted to have an easy migration path.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU - Linus states he hates it. He does say that it's a fine license, and that the freedom to choose a license is important. The video is worth a watch if you want to understand what people who disagree with GPLv3 dislike about it.

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