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Comment by holdenk | Hacker News Reader

The thing is there are a lot of GPL-like licenses. Linux might have ended up under a BSD-style license rather than a GPL license. While things certainly would have been different, I'm not convinced they would have been worse.

The assertion that there would be no open source movement without RMS is a bit difficult to believe, unless we are going for a very narrow definition of open source.

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Linux under BSDL? We already know how that would end. We'd lose half a generation's best work because it's trapped in the wreckage of vendors' failed proprietary forks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars

Your argument makes the unfounded assumption that those vendors would have done the work you "lost" if the code had been GPL licensed.

As a counterpoint, FreeBSD has progressed at a steady clip -- I fail to see how it is significantly behind Linux, and is significantly ahead in many areas.

It falls behind by not being as popular. I think this is not a result of BSD being inferior, it's just how things came into being. I don't have numbers on BSD developers or the rate of improvement, but I guess one reason for it is that BSD license put off more developers compared to GPLv2.

So do you think that success of MacOS X (derived from FreeBSD)does not show benefitsof BSD model? Or Microsoft's use of NetBSD? And also, many developers put off by GPL( I am for example),

The objective reasons for being not as popular I think, that FreeBSD never positioned itself as a desktop system, and many small things (such as how fast it boots) are neglected. Yet, overall simplicity and order is attractive to me; a lo easier to understand internals IMHO.

It shows almost no success because the code that makes MacOS X and Windows what they are is still proprietary. Having a UNIX shell in MacOS X might be nice, but that's only one part of the system.

What's the benefit? The users are still running proprietary software, and the vendor is still confined to the same 10% or so of the computer market.

... I guess one reason for it is that BSD license put off more developers compared to GPLv2.

No, it was just timing. The AT&T lawsuit cast a palor on the BSDs just when Linux started hitting its stride. By the time the lawsuit was settled, Linux had dominant mindshare.

Same reason why MySQL is popular -- PHP gave it the mindshare. Same reason why PHP is popular -- it was one of the few options available at the time, and by the time better things came along, it was already firmly rooted.

I do assume that. Linux rapidly caught up with the BSDs despite their huge head start, which demonstrates the industry does have a critical mass of developers who are willing to contribute their work rather than go through the pain of tivoization or building from scratch.

So, its my understanding, that this wasn't do the GPL versus the BSD license, but had more to do with the uncertainty hanging over the BSD distributions due to a lawsuit threat from proprietary Unix.

Now of course I could be wrong, but I think there may be other factors which could explain the difference.

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