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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

Reading this discussion is hard for me without thinking, what would have happened if the whole Linux ecosystem was BSD-licensed?

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It would have an ecosystem the same size as BSD's around it.

The GPL license allows companies to contribute technology to the project without fear the technology they contributed will be used in proprietary products from their competitors.

Oracle, for instance, doesn't have to fear HP will use BtrFS in HP/UX and compete with Solaris' ZFS.

If you are referring to the fairly durable schism between the folks who define "open" and "free" one way and the people who define "open" and "free" a different way, then I don't think a whole lot would have happened [1]. I tried to get Sun back into the workstation/desktop game from afar (I had already left by that time) but it wasn't to be. Their original business model is just as durable today was it was when they were founded, spec the hardware, do enough software work that the user experience is capable, and let others build on that. I keep hoping someone will do that with FreeBSD but so far, no such luck.

[1] We can use the existence proof that FreeBSD exists with a bsd license and it hasn't materially changed the Linux outcome.

I think that iXsystems' support of PC-BSD is something like an attempt to do that, but it seems like they're not doing much workstation stuff these days, whereas previously they were at least trying to do slightly more. PC-BSD is getting a reasonable open source ecosystem and user experience around it, though, such that someone who can handle the business development and hardware side of things would have a rather easier time than someone starting from stock FreeBSD.

That's easy,some BigCo would've co-opted it, paid developers to go the last mile and polish it to make it usable, and make it incompatible with everything out there and sold it. Perhaps Sun or IBM or even Oracle. E.g See OS X and to a lesser extent, Linspire/Lindows.

Hasn't happened to PostgreSQL and I doubt it would have happened to Linux. The leader and community are pretty strong with Linux and that is not about the GPL. I would imagine some folks would fork it, but that always is a losing game from a business point of view (paying for a fork vs. patching and getting everyone to pay). Having BSD licensed kernel at that point in history during the AT&T BSD lawsuit would have been seriously interesting.

Maintaining a fork isn't a big issue if you have enough resources, considering that if Linux was BSD licensed they would still have had their proprietary fork mirror it "close enough" to pull in at least some of the big changes from the main Linux tree. Android seems to work in this manor to a certain extent (although they open source patches back when they have to because of GPL).

You would most likely have ended up with a bleeding edge open source version and several more conservative closed ports.

Bear in mind that a lot of the reason Linux development is strong is because many of it's developers are paid to work on it and then contribute back (again because of GPL). If a company could gain a competitive advantage by paying the same people to work on a closed fork..

I think the problem with maintaining the fork is the speed of development of the community, and let's face it, it is much easier to monetize hardware than software in the open source world. The fear of being left behind and weird vendor specific errors should not be discounted.

I agree though, someone would try. I just think Linux would have done just as well with a BSD license being released at the time it was. The people and the timing deserve more credit than the license.

you haven't seen EnterpriseDB or vFabric data director then

Neither are more popular than the original

See also the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars, during which the industry mostly lost a decade of work entombed in proprietary forks. Tit-for-tat has better survival characteristics, and the GPL is no exception.

> "last mile"

I strongly disagree with this phrase. I'm not saying making Linux usable is 90% of the work; it isn't, but it isn't "the last mile" either (maybe that + customer support + developer relations and evangelism equals to 15-20%).

I meant last mile as in developer scratching their itch. It's much more sexy to work on new and interesting things(that mostly break existing things) rather than the doing the grunt work on backwards compatibility, bugs or documentation, not to mention enforcing a central vision and design on developers(ever hear of OSS devs quitting or making forks because of differences in opinion?) .

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