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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

> The evolutionarily stable strategy for a piece of software is "anybody may use this for anything, including commercially, for free." That's MIT, BSD, Apache, the licenses that ask for nothing. Every project that has tried to be a slightly less generous dove has lost to a project that stayed a full dove

Linux (GPLv2) seems like an obvious counterexample?

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Arguably that happened because Linux was, in fact, the most generous option: the BSDs effectively refused to get contributors beyond their very small groups, and refused to incorporate patches to support "bad" hardware or nonfree blobs - meanwhile, Linux was built around modules that could contain anything regardless of license, and happily accepted new patches and unknown maintainers. You still see it today: Linux literally built its own distributed VCS (git), while some BSDs are still on the hyper-centralized CVS.

If there isn't an even more generous option is simply because building a mainstream OS is incredibly hard.

How open a platform is to external contributors is a very different axis than the legal permissiveness one the article describes.

It's the same axis: business-friendliness.

The legal permissiveness described is critical for most software because it enables business adoption. But for a kernel, which sits at the intersection of hardware and software, "free as in beer" is not enough, there is another critical factor: how easy it is to make it work with proprietary hardware. A free kernel that won't work with my custom chip and whose maintainers won't accept the necessary patches to fix this state of things, is just useless to my business.

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