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Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

I does. The OP says "Linux" but means "Linux distros", which are made of thousands of "commingled" pieces (i.e. the licence of one piece does not affect the other).

Each piece that becomes MIT means less pressure on corporate users to give back any changes they make, and we'll end back up in the 1980s again where "Amazon Linux" is full of secret-sauce they refuse to publish and makes the base system incompatible with "Google Linux" (or whatever happens to be kicking about), creating deliberate lock-in out of a system that started open. In much the same way that macOS and FreeBSD are divergent today.

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In theory there could be a the MIT version relicensed to GPL and this version could be carried as a standard if having MIT software as core utilities was considered enough of a threat - right? You just have to retain original license/attribution.

That would be an awfully awkward move in the realm of Linux-related politics but if having an MIT-licensed coreutils was such an existential thread, at least you can fix it with aggressive license moves and not code.

That doesn't matter. Amazon or whoever can add as much secret sauce as they like; people can freely use the original so there's no issue.

We've balkanized Linux but you're free to use the original (which we are deliberately incompatible with, as is rival #2, rival #3, rival #4, etc. and we're all mutually incompatible with each other)

Amazon and other clouds already patch the hell out of Linux, but they don't distribute physical devices with that Linux on it to anyone, so they don't have to deliver source code either.

I am not totally sure I see the actual concern here, that a company is going to sell devices with a really great `find` implementation but not contribute it upstream?

In the 1980s and 1990s, there were a number of commercial Unices (SunOS, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, etc.) Every one of them was incompatible with each other, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. They were all competing against each other and all seemed to encourage you to use their proprietary extensions in your software and deliberately fuck over anyone using any other variants.

What it meant was a headache for writing platform-agnostic software. It was not a productive way to create software.

Replacing GPL software with MIT software just encourages this behaviour to come back. We already see it with how macOS userland took FreeBSD and sprinkled incompatibilities everywhere.

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