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You prove my point: both companies, Apple with Darwin/OS X, and Google with Android are not really trying to develop a healthy ecosystem around these systems. B

You prove my point: both companies, Apple with Darwin/OS X, and Google with Android are not really trying to develop a healthy ecosystem around these systems. But at the very least Google needs to provide the source to GPL'ed software (kernel modifications, etc.). If you have to publish changes anyway, at some point it becomes more attractive to work with upstream, since you cannot differentiate your product via that software. We still have to see if this happens, but there is a long of history of companies that did not contribute much initially, but are now working with kernel.org much more reliably. (E.g. many big-iron vendors.)

nanairo 16y ago
But from what I hear in the Linux world, having GPLed code didn't make all hardware producers write their own drivers and publish them. Some did, others released only simpler versions, and other didn't release anything and it was up to volunteer to do it. Between this and a Darwin world where the latter group would release good drivers but keep them close sourced, I don't think there's any advantage for the community either way. While I do agree that Apple is most definitely not trying to build a healthy ecosystem around Darwin (or in fact _any_ ecosystem at all...), Apple itself still publishes all of its Darwin code, and hence it would have complied with the licence had that been GPL. (the only exception being drivers but that's not up to Apple, as the situation in the Linux world showed). Apple could have still kept Aqua and the rest closed source. So using Apple as an example of a company that took but didn't give back because of the licence seems wrong.