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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Tbh I don't think fighting open source is Google's best play. I think it is in their own best interest to keep it fully open. It is free labor by those who are most passionate. It gives strong signals at what people want, this direction you develop. It strengthens security as more people try to test it. It means people work on forks rather than alternatives. All this is true even with a monopolistic market share.

So yes, I do think they are being naïve. The stance is myopic. It is only a good move in the short term, and barely even that. It is under the false belief that we operate in a zero sum game.

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Most successful open source projects have devs being paid by big corporations, including Linux itself, which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.

Also in the last century most software was commercial, and thanks to business friendly licenses we are back to demos, PD, Shareware and co, only with new names for a younger generation.

Google will do just fine.

I don’t get the hate for business licenses.

I’ve seen many open source contributors deflated because they wanted to share their code/solutions with other individuals and the world to learn from only to have their work sold as a service by a big cloud vendor without seeing something back for it. Or maybe even getting more work back to support the cloud vendor for free.

So I’m not surprised at all that licenses that allow commercial use up to a point and above that require seperate license or contributions back. It is still open source in a lot of ways. Can still be part of other open source distributions that themselves make no profit etc. And only companies that are more than able to pay must pay something.

It's a good idea if it actually works. Are enough commercial users paying up so that these projects get some serious funding?

If companies avoid using software governed by such licenses then the overall impact is negative in my opinion, because it will lead to competing and diverging clean room clones that just split the community and the ecosystem.

I agree it would be bad if it leads to a lot of replication and that is even easier in this age of LLMs. But has it been shown that this will happen?

which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.

Correlation is not causation.

What I lived through, was Linux taking off like a juggernaut, and IBM embracing it as a result. Large corps came along for the ride, they didn't drive it and at best paid for some gas.

DEVs being paid is simply what it is. The entire scsi/sata stack was originally re-authored by 3ware for example.

Why?

To sell stuff, and the guy was an advocate too.

It's always been this way, under the great wonder of the GPL, blessed be it.

It was so relevant that even Wikipedia discusses this, we were using Solaris, HP-UX and Aix for actual production deployments. Linux was our MP3 server.

Meanwhile every startup in SV was using Linux, Facebook was using Linux, Google, and everyone in between. This was early 2000. It had immense momentum without big boys like IBM coming in (and IBM was massive compared to Google or Facebook of that day).

Really? Every single one?

You must have a good source of information for such a statement.

Do you want examples why Solaris was selling so well before the .com crash?

There are several 'early 2000s' after the .com crash. Linux growth was phenomenal, and as tends to happen with growth, starts with smaller market share.

There is no conflict in "linux was growing without the big boys' and 'it started with small market share'.

And yes, you can find exceptions to the rule, although regardless, do you see me saying "exclusively"? What does someone using Solaris, have to do with Linux only growing due to external help?

FreeBSD 4 was big in early 2000s.

Yes, yet it was. There were the BSDs, some more popular than others. A lot of the time, especially back in the earlier days, stuff was more regional.

There certainly were mailing lists, usenet, forums, all of an all-encompasing scope. But there were also very local user groups, and pockets of wildly more and less usage depending upon region. The Internet was young, and many made decisions predicated upon what they saw around them.

The best way to be sure you had support, was a local healthy community of hackers around.

I vividly remember my father coming home from Borders Books & Music one fateful day in 1998 with a boxed copy of Red Hat Linux 5.1. (This was the distro that eventually became Fedora, not RHEL). It was the first Linux distro I’d ever used, but my dad also had some older SuSE and Slackware CDs and floppies in his archives as well. I’m confident Red Hat has always paid their employees, and I’m confident SuSE GmbH did as well.

Famously IBM did eventually buy Red Hat, but not for another 20 years. The fact is, Linux was alive and well and growing as far back as the late 1990s, and devs were getting paid. You could literally buy CDs in a box of an installable Linux distribution at an ordinary retail chain bookstore in 1998.

And for whatever it’s worth, the reason Linux took off the way it did when it did was because the Dot Com Bubble helped pump smaller companies like Red Hat or SuSE up, and they were certainly selling floppies and pressed CDs at a margin like Shareware as well, since most people didn’t have the time or hardware to download and burn ISOs until the early/mid-2000s when P2P music took over the world.

(I remember. I was there. I guess I’m old now…)

Google learned that it's exactly not in in their best interest when they lost their court case against Epic a few years ago which is why they are shifting focus away from open source and moving towards Apple's walled garden approach. If they had locked down their platform similarly as Apple did, Epic would probably have lost it's case for similar reasons.

Granted, we know Android would not be where it is today without open source contributions.

> Granted, we know Android would not be where it is today without open source contributions.

But the parts of Android that are majority outside developed is still available as the Linux kernel. I have my doubts that the uniquely Android bits of the userland and system services have many outside contributions.

Isn't the biggest problem caused by the opaque drivers for the hardware? At least that seemed to be the roadblock a few years ago.

I forgot about this. Epic lost the same kind of suit against Apple. That's hilarious.

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