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Comment by wwfn | Hacker News Reader

Wealth generated on top of underpaid labor is a reoccurring theme -- and in this case maybe surprisingly exacerbated by LLMs.

Would this be different if the underlying code had a viral license? If google's infrastructure was built on a GPL'ed libcurl [0], would they have investment in the code/a team with resources to evaluate security reports (slop or otherwise)? Ditto for libxml.

Does GPL help the linux kernel get investment from it's corporate users?

[0] Perhaps an impossible hypothetical. Would google have skipped over the imaginary GPL'ed libcurl or libxml for a more permissively licensed library? And even if they didn't, would a big company's involvement in an openly developed ecosystem create asymmetric funding/goals, a la XMPP or Nix?

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Copyleft licenses are made to support freedom for everyone and particularly end-users. They only limit freedom of developers / maintainers to exploit the code and users.

> Does GPL help the linux kernel get investment from it's corporate users?

GPL has helped "linux kernel the project" greatly, but companies invest in it out of their self-interest. They want to benefit from upstream improvements and playing nicely by upstreaming changes is just much cheaper than maintaining own kernel fork.

On other side you have companies like Sony that used BSD OS code for their game consoles for decades and contributed shit.

So... Two unrelated things.

I would have thought supporting libcurl and libxml would also be in a company's self-interest. Is that companies do this for GPL'ed linux kernel but not BSD evidence that strong copyleft licensing limits the extent to which OSS projects are exploited/under-resourced?

  > I would have thought supporting libcurl and libxml would also be in a company's self-interest.

Unfortunately majority of companies don't have something special they really need to add to cURL. They okay using it as is - so they have no reason to pay salary to cURL developers regardless of licensing.

Yes they want it to be secure, but as always nobody except few very large orgs care about security for real.

  > Is that companies do this for GPL'ed linux kernel but not BSD evidence that strong copyleft licensing limits the extent to which OSS projects are exploited/under-resourced?

It certainly helped with "under-resourced" part. Whatever you considered "exploited" is up to discussion. From project perspective ofc copyleft licensing benefited the project.

Linus Torvalds end up with a good amount of publicity and is now somewhat well set-off, but almost all other kernel developers live in obscurity earning somewhat average salaries. I pretty sure we can all agree that Linux Kernel made a massive positive impact on whole humanity and compared to that payoff to stakeholders is rather small IMO.

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