6 ms·

This is a weird rejoinder to make in a thread about ESR, who was one of the loudest voices arguing for corporate-friendly language ("open-source" not "free soft

This is a weird rejoinder to make in a thread about ESR, who was one of the loudest voices arguing for corporate-friendly language ("open-source" not "free software") and licenses (permissive, not copyleft).

DuskStar 7y ago
And yet, if that's what it took to drive corporate adoption of open source software, it was almost certainly worth it... Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.
- kazinator 7y ago
  > Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Not only can I imagine, but I lived in that world. > Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary. Linux was excellent before ... Google even existed.
  - SEJeff 7y ago
    One of the big breakout moments for Linux was when IBM added SMP support. Before then it was never useful for anything "serious" or commercial generally speaking. Linux was a really nice hobby before then.
    - kazinator 7y ago
      I used SMP in 1995, using a 1.3 kernel. Board was an Asus with two 100 MHz Pentiums. I saw about a 35% speedup on a "make -j 3" back then; there was a lot of coarse-grained locking still (BKL), and the hardware wasn't good to begin with. I'm pretty sure IBM had nothing to do with Linux; the name that comes up in my mind when I think back to that time is "Alan Cox", not "IBM". I did contract work for infomine.com in 1994; it ran on Linux.
  - api 7y ago
    There's a good chance Google wouldn't exist without it.
    - jraph 7y ago
      Had Linux not existed, the world would possibly run on something based on a BSD kernel today, Google included. Maybe with a GNU userspace, maybe not. And LineageOS would probably have a hard time existing because the manufacturers would not be forced to release their kernels. We might have proprietary kernels optimised for Intel CPUs, too. The FSF might also have decided to continue the development of Hurd, or someone to write improvements to a BSD kernel under a GPL license.
    - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      Not necessarily. Remember, the dot com boom happened before Linux was even a serious contender as a server OS; back then Sun Microsystems was king. Google was founded in '98 and the expense of Sun hardware might have slowed Google's profitability slightly but not enough to matter. We might be talking about the Google-Sun duopoly today instead of the Wintel duopoly today had Linux not existed.
      - kazinator 7y ago
        In 1998, Linux was reliable and performant. It just hadn't made inroads into big corporations to give it pointy-haired-boss cred.
        ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        In 1998, Linux was still behind SunOS/Solaris in maturity and even if it had been even, Intel x86 hardware wasn't remotely on par with what Sun machines could do.
        kazinator 7y ago
        Speaking of Sun machines, in 1997, I was running Red Hat 2 Linux on a Sun SparcStation 20 at Nortel.
- earenndil 7y ago
  BSD was already open-source and superior to linux as the time it came out; it was only hampered by licensing concerns.
kazinator 7y ago
Ah, but a license, no matter how permissive, does not ipso facto cause the admission of questionable changes into the upstream of a project that everybody trusts. It just means you can do whatever you want with your copy, within the scope of whatever realm you control.
api 7y ago
This might be a good thing then. This has become a pet peeve of mine. At the last FOSDEM there was a talk on "open source under attack" claiming that anything other than permissive licensing represents an attack on open source: https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/osi/ https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/osi/ Two of the three presenters were lawyers for Google and Facebook, two giant surveillance companies with absolutely closed SaaS silo ecosystems. Evidently the "spirit of open source" is free labor for surveillance capitalism and pop-up SaaS products that monetize open source with paywalled APIs and give nothing back. FOSDEM != OSI, but there's a common DNA here.
- ofrzeta 7y ago
  ".. parties who seek to limit the promise of free software" that's an interesting phrase as Free Software has always also been about limiting freedom. After all a license is something that puts certain restrictions on the usage of a piece of software. This is not much different to accusing the GPL of "limiting the promise of free software". Or the AGPL for that matter, which is probably what the OSI proponents are thinking anyway.
  - api 7y ago
    The MongoDB license they are picking on barely differs from the AGPL.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      This doesn't seem to be accurate, especially as far as OSI and OSD is concerned. Say what you want about the AGPL, but the license does not discriminate against any field of endeavour - it does not state "you can't use this software to offer a network-based endpoint" or anything like that. It just triggers a source distribution requirement in case of such use, by analogy with distributing the software itself to the public (an analogy which is in fact supported by copyright law itself, viz. "public performance" of a copyrighted work). The MongoDB approach post-relicensing is very different.

DuskStar 7y ago

And yet, if that's what it took to drive corporate adoption of open source software, it was almost certainly worth it... Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.

kazinator 7y ago
> Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Not only can I imagine, but I lived in that world. > Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary. Linux was excellent before ... Google even existed.
- SEJeff 7y ago
  One of the big breakout moments for Linux was when IBM added SMP support. Before then it was never useful for anything "serious" or commercial generally speaking. Linux was a really nice hobby before then.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    I used SMP in 1995, using a 1.3 kernel. Board was an Asus with two 100 MHz Pentiums. I saw about a 35% speedup on a "make -j 3" back then; there was a lot of coarse-grained locking still (BKL), and the hardware wasn't good to begin with. I'm pretty sure IBM had nothing to do with Linux; the name that comes up in my mind when I think back to that time is "Alan Cox", not "IBM". I did contract work for infomine.com in 1994; it ran on Linux.
- api 7y ago
  There's a good chance Google wouldn't exist without it.
  - jraph 7y ago
    Had Linux not existed, the world would possibly run on something based on a BSD kernel today, Google included. Maybe with a GNU userspace, maybe not. And LineageOS would probably have a hard time existing because the manufacturers would not be forced to release their kernels. We might have proprietary kernels optimised for Intel CPUs, too. The FSF might also have decided to continue the development of Hurd, or someone to write improvements to a BSD kernel under a GPL license.
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    Not necessarily. Remember, the dot com boom happened before Linux was even a serious contender as a server OS; back then Sun Microsystems was king. Google was founded in '98 and the expense of Sun hardware might have slowed Google's profitability slightly but not enough to matter. We might be talking about the Google-Sun duopoly today instead of the Wintel duopoly today had Linux not existed.
    - kazinator 7y ago
      In 1998, Linux was reliable and performant. It just hadn't made inroads into big corporations to give it pointy-haired-boss cred.
      - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        In 1998, Linux was still behind SunOS/Solaris in maturity and even if it had been even, Intel x86 hardware wasn't remotely on par with what Sun machines could do.
        kazinator 7y ago
        Speaking of Sun machines, in 1997, I was running Red Hat 2 Linux on a Sun SparcStation 20 at Nortel.
earenndil 7y ago
BSD was already open-source and superior to linux as the time it came out; it was only hampered by licensing concerns.

kazinator 7y ago

Ah, but a license, no matter how permissive, does not ipso facto cause the admission of questionable changes into the upstream of a project that everybody trusts. It just means you can do whatever you want with your copy, within the scope of whatever realm you control.

api 7y ago

This might be a good thing then. This has become a pet peeve of mine. At the last FOSDEM there was a talk on "open source under attack" claiming that anything other than permissive licensing represents an attack on open source: https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/osi/ https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/osi/ Two of the three presenters were lawyers for Google and Facebook, two giant surveillance companies with absolutely closed SaaS silo ecosystems. Evidently the "spirit of open source" is free labor for surveillance capitalism and pop-up SaaS products that monetize open source with paywalled APIs and give nothing back. FOSDEM != OSI, but there's a common DNA here.

ofrzeta 7y ago
".. parties who seek to limit the promise of free software" that's an interesting phrase as Free Software has always also been about limiting freedom. After all a license is something that puts certain restrictions on the usage of a piece of software. This is not much different to accusing the GPL of "limiting the promise of free software". Or the AGPL for that matter, which is probably what the OSI proponents are thinking anyway.
- api 7y ago
  The MongoDB license they are picking on barely differs from the AGPL.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    This doesn't seem to be accurate, especially as far as OSI and OSD is concerned. Say what you want about the AGPL, but the license does not discriminate against any field of endeavour - it does not state "you can't use this software to offer a network-based endpoint" or anything like that. It just triggers a source distribution requirement in case of such use, by analogy with distributing the software itself to the public (an analogy which is in fact supported by copyright law itself, viz. "public performance" of a copyrighted work). The MongoDB approach post-relicensing is very different.