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The historical context is that Linux had a proper community support at the time when everyone was looking for Unix on x86, to migrate off RISC workstations, and

by trasz 6y ago

The historical context is that Linux had a proper community support at the time when everyone was looking for Unix on x86, to migrate off RISC workstations, and BSDs at the time were either a bunch of jerks, or had unclear status due to ATT vs UCB lawsuit. You could try to argue that licensing had played a role at this, but experience with other projects suggests otherwise.

toyg 6y ago
You know what enabled that "proper community"? A license that provided a sort of moral compass, fostering collaboration and goodwill towards shared improvement, safe in the knowledge that efforts wouldn't be abused. Something that other licenses still fail to provide, to this day.
- trasz 6y ago
  Except that communities work equally well with other licenses. GPL doesn’t enable anything; there’s just no correlation there.
  - toyg 6y ago
    > Except that communities work equally well with other licenses. Today. Not in the '90s cut-throat "pirates of SV" environment.
    - trasz 6y ago
      Not true, as evidenced by Postgres, or Apache, or X11, to give just a few examples of GPL-free communities from the nineties.