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Comment by marty-oehme | Hacker News Reader

Very cool project! I do have to admit - looking far, far into the future - I am a bit scared of a Linux ABI-compatible kernel with an MIT license.

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I agree, I know a lot of people aren't huge fans of it but in the long run Linux being GPL2 was a huge factor in its success.

Too late? https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/linuxemu/

Somewhere there is a dark timeline where the BSDs won, there are 50 commercial and open source variants all with their own kernel and userland. The only promise of interoperability is in extremely ossified layers like POSIX. There is, however, something terrible gathering its strength. A colossus. The great Shade that will eat the net. In boardroom meetings across the land, CTOs whisper its name and tremble... "OS/2."

Waaaarp

Also, AFAIK SmartOS / Ilumos has had a combat layer for it, too.

> I am a bit scared of a Linux ABI-compatible kernel with an MIT license.

What's the threat? Solaris/Illumos, the BSDs, even Windows, have all tried -sometimes more than once- to be compatible with the Linux ABI, and in the end they've all given up because the Linux ABI evolves way too fast to keep up and is underdocumented. Someday someone -perhaps TFA- will succeed in building momentum for a well-defined and highly functional least common denominator subset of the Linux ABI, and that will be a very good thing (IMO) regardless of their choice of license.

I guess you imagine that everyone will switch to Moss and oh-noes!-everyone-will-be-free-to-not-contribute-back!! So what?

Why?

because otherwise big tech companies will take it and modify and release hardware with it without releasing patches etc? Basically being selfish and greedy?

It is neither selfish nor greedy to accept and use a gift freely given to you.

Receiving a gift does not confer obligations on the recipient.

True, but you would probably still be pissed if somebody took your gift and hit you over the head with it.

It does. There is an implied expectation that the recipient will will not be selfish. They can pay it back, pay it forward, possibly later when they can afford it, etc., but they are expected not to be selfish and also give someone something eventually.

Gifts definitely confer obligations on the recipient. You can experience this firsthand: take the next gift a loved one gives you, and then sell it, and let them know. Please report back on how you selling their gift impacts your relationship with that person.

People can license their code however they please, but comparing open source software to a gift is not an argument for permissive licenses.

I’ve done precisely this and it was fine. Gifts do not confer obligation. Anyone who thinks they do is at best insincere and at worst a jerk.

Does this happen to freebsd? I know plenty of closed source Linux drivers.

Isn't that basically every router out there?

Most routers are on Linux now.

Routers are all running ddwrt which we only have access to because of a GPL lawsuit against Linksys. The GPL works.

Because unlike most other functionality, you generally need hw specs or cooperation to write drivers (see Nvidia GSP).

Anyone can write Photoshop (provided reasonable resources). The problem is going to be proprietary file format and compatibility with the ecosystem. It's same with hardware, except several orders of magnitude worse.

FreeBSD already has Linux ABI compatibility and has for a long time.

I have to say the GPL trolling in this post is some of the worst I've ever seen on HN. Literally 99% of the comments GPL trolls coming in and thread shitting everywhere. It's genuinely disgusting.

It will be compatible for ~5 minutes:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/stable-api-non...

> [Moss has] binary compatibility with Linux userspace applications (currently capable of running most BusyBox commands).

Per your link

> Note: Please realize that this article describes the in kernel interfaces, not the kernel to userspace interfaces.

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