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To be fair, plenty of people care more about the "Linux" than they do about the "freedom" part. Case in point: macOS. Basically everything that makes it "macOS"

To be fair, plenty of people care more about the "Linux" than they do about the "freedom" part. Case in point: macOS. Basically everything that makes it "macOS" is proprietary, but it gained popularity because it was mostly Linux-compatible. Unix compatibility is worth quite a bit on its own, Linux wouldn't have gotten half as far without it. And Unix is historically proprietary and closed-source.

AceJohnny2 7y ago
> And Unix is historically proprietary and closed-source "Unix" the brand name, maybe, but "Unix" the source code less so. BSD was based on Unix. The story of why Linux became popular instead of BSD is that BSD was mired in a copyright fight with AT&T over that relationship at the time. Per http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html who was active at the time (and before he became today's wingnut) "It would take another two years and the great Internet explosion of 1993–1994 before the true importance of Linux and the open-source BSD distributions became evident to the rest of the Unix world. Unfortunately for the BSDers, an AT&T lawsuit against BSDI (the startup company that had backed the Jolitz port) consumed much of that time and motivated some key Berkeley developers to switch to Linux. > Code copying and theft of trade secrets was alleged. The actual infringing code was not identified for nearly two years. The lawsuit could have dragged on for much longer but for the fact that Novell bought USL from AT&T and sought a settlement. In the end, three files were removed from the 18,000 that made up the distribution, and a number of minor changes were made to other files. In addition, the University agreed to add USL copyrights to about 70 files, with the stipulation that those files continued to be freely redistributed. -- Marshall Kirk McKusick The settlement set an important precedent by freeing an entire working Unix from proprietary control, but its effects on BSD itself were dire. Matters were not helped when, in 1992–1994, the Computer Science Research Group at Berkeley shut down; afterwards, factional warfare within the BSD community split it into three competing development efforts. As a result, the BSD lineage lagged behind Linux at a crucial time and lost to it the lead position in the Unix community."
posix_me_less 7y ago
Macos is not "mostly Linux-compatible". It has unixy tools from GNU and other places, but it has little to do with Linux. Ecosystem, native development is different. Some tech is badlyemulated, e.g. Docker containers. If anything, use of Macos shows that people found a way to work with a shiny unixy desktop software without Linux and without software freedom.

AceJohnny2 7y ago

> And Unix is historically proprietary and closed-source "Unix" the brand name, maybe, but "Unix" the source code less so. BSD was based on Unix. The story of why Linux became popular instead of BSD is that BSD was mired in a copyright fight with AT&T over that relationship at the time. Per http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html who was active at the time (and before he became today's wingnut) "It would take another two years and the great Internet explosion of 1993–1994 before the true importance of Linux and the open-source BSD distributions became evident to the rest of the Unix world. Unfortunately for the BSDers, an AT&T lawsuit against BSDI (the startup company that had backed the Jolitz port) consumed much of that time and motivated some key Berkeley developers to switch to Linux. > Code copying and theft of trade secrets was alleged. The actual infringing code was not identified for nearly two years. The lawsuit could have dragged on for much longer but for the fact that Novell bought USL from AT&T and sought a settlement. In the end, three files were removed from the 18,000 that made up the distribution, and a number of minor changes were made to other files. In addition, the University agreed to add USL copyrights to about 70 files, with the stipulation that those files continued to be freely redistributed. -- Marshall Kirk McKusick The settlement set an important precedent by freeing an entire working Unix from proprietary control, but its effects on BSD itself were dire. Matters were not helped when, in 1992–1994, the Computer Science Research Group at Berkeley shut down; afterwards, factional warfare within the BSD community split it into three competing development efforts. As a result, the BSD lineage lagged behind Linux at a crucial time and lost to it the lead position in the Unix community."

posix_me_less 7y ago

Macos is not "mostly Linux-compatible". It has unixy tools from GNU and other places, but it has little to do with Linux. Ecosystem, native development is different. Some tech is badlyemulated, e.g. Docker containers. If anything, use of Macos shows that people found a way to work with a shiny unixy desktop software without Linux and without software freedom.