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Comment by gamache | Hacker News Reader

Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Ultrix, SunOS -- flops, all.

All but FreeBSD are proprietary (I doubt OpenSolaris commands a meaningful market-share for now) and the combined market share of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD is dwarfed by Linux's, which is dwarfed by OSX's.

OSX has some parts that are BSD-free, parts that are GPL-free, other parts that are open-source and the rest is the most heavily guarded proprietary stuff in this industry. The fact it is hugely more successful than the combined presence of its competitors bears testimony to the fact that basing your OS on the work of others without giving much back is a winning strategy while contributing to products that can be used in such way is pretty dumb from a business point of view.

Markets are pretty good at identifying opportunities and the fact there is no Red Hat on the BSD space should suffice as evidence ESR is wrong in this one.

I'd say OSX's (and Red Hat's) success bears testimony to the fact that good marketing, not good technology, is the deciding factor in market success.

I think that the first is a closed, proprietary product based mainly on BSD-style code and the other are services centered around the evolution of a free GPL-like product that remains free speaks for itself.

I probably wasn't very clear. I'm not trying to say the technology is bad; simply that success in the market is due to the marketing and not to the technology. Others who are selling the same or similar technology haven't had the same market success as either Apple or Red Hat.

Of course, marketing is important. Apple also has very sexy hardware on its side, something RH doesn't. People basically buy Macs and they happen to come with OSX just like people buy Dell and that happens to come with Vista by default.

You have to actively choose anything else if you want to run it.

Apple certainly "gives back" substantial amounts of code. Perhaps not as much as you and I want but your statement is a misrepresentation of fact. The amount of open-source goodness Apple has added to WebKit (née KHTML) alone is ridiculous.

And what is the license under which WebKit/KHTML is?

I believe it's a combo of LGPL and BSD.

KHTML is LGPL. WebKit, according to Wikipedia, has WebCore and JavascriptCore licensed under LGPL and the whole WebKit under BSD, which strikes me as slightly odd because, IIRC, LGPL could not be just re-licensed under BSD unless the re-licensing party owned all the copyrights of the parts and I am quite sure Apple does not own all of it.

WebCore and JavaScriptCore are primarily written in C++ and all code within them is virally licensed under LGPL. Apple did not change the license. Some portions of WebCore and JavaScriptCore if compiled independently would be licensed under BSD. WebKit is a thin shell over the above-mentioned two. On OSX WebKit's primarily implemented in Obj. C. On Windows it's primarily implemented in COM/C++. WebKit if compiled independently would have a BSD license but when compiled with WebCore and JavaScriptCore has an LGPL license virally.

So, the combo WebKit with WebCore and JavascriptCore is LGPL, not BSD.

The only reason to contribute to a BSD project is when you dominate the segment, like Apple does with WebKit browsers, and you want more companies to feed around your ecosystem increasing its value for you.

Don't assume Steve Jobs does it out of his good heart. The OPENSTEP OS was one of the more closed (as in "doesn't play well with others") Unix variants of its time.

Oops... Actually, OPENSTEP is an API implementation. The OS was named OpenStep.

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