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> People like Patrick McHardy do an enormous service to the Linux community A response to legal attacks, justified or not, is that a lot of places with $$$ to

> People like Patrick McHardy do an enormous service to the Linux community A response to legal attacks, justified or not, is that a lot of places with $$$ to fund the GPL work ban GPL as an existential threat, and fund work under more liberal licences. That shouldn't be a valid get-out for people ignoring the licence terms. But it is the reality and has to be part of the argument / strategy. That's aside from any consideration about the form of the particular legal attacks you refer to.

baybal2 6y ago
They are free to use something other than Linux, or GPL software. This is pretty much what an opensource is, don't like GPL, go get some code not under it. The much of the *BSD family whose pretty much only point of existence over GNU was its use of permissive license is there laying around, with their devs almost begging for somebody to take their code, and fund their work. And still, how many of those companies went, and chose FreeBSD over Linux? Not many, very likely just single digits. Most continue skulking, squabbling, crying, facing lawsuits, lose money, face, but they still continue to bite the bitter fruit, which is Linux. The simple truth is that they have no alternative to Linux, and they don't have resources to make an OS of their own, or bring the numerous permissively licensed "Linux killers" to usable state.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Sony, Apple, with endless contributions back to upstream. /s
- andi999 6y ago
  I chose it (now back on windows, different story...). The GUI/xserve configuration was problematic. To me, I think bsd is great for servers, but for Desktop less usable then linux.
- outsomnia 6y ago
  > And still, how many of those guys went, and chose FreeBSD over Linux? Well, Apple is at 14% of the smartphone market globally and that's derived from BSD, Macs are smaller but also BSD. The OS is just one case, it's hard to catch up with Linux, but that has not stopped Fuschia (BSD/MIT/Apache) and proprietary, nor SaaS where Linux powers it but is not "distributed" in GPL terms. The shape of the future is people are stopping feeding the GPL commons in favour of permissive licenses that the $$$ wants https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/open-source-licenses-trends-and-predictions https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/o... shows over half of projects in 2019 are MIT /Apache vs GPL(s), and a steady decline in even GPL3 usage. I don't know what should be done about enforcement but I do know these realities have to be factored into any useful considering about that.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    I have no idea how that insinuation came upon that opensource is somehow "abandoning GPL." GPL was, is, and will likely be the de-facto one, and only license people call an opensource license for as long as we talk about serious projects outside of webdev realm. The statistics is skewed as of recently because of the overabundance of GitHub one day projects.
  - jabl 6y ago
    > The shape of the future is people are stopping feeding the GPL commons in favour of permissive licenses that the $$$ wants https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/o https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/o... shows over half of projects in 2019 are MIT /Apache vs GPL(s), and a steady decline in even GPL3 usage. Yes, that's how it looks. In the long term, I think that will turn out to be a Faustian bargain for users and hackers. It will be the world the commercial software devs want; a large pool of permissively licensed software that they can pick and choose from to assemble $$$ products (with a number of useful idiots and sometimes even businesses contributing to maintaining the underlying pieces), without having to worry about contributing anything back. But the dream of a Free Software computing experience, where you can inspect and modify every part of the software you run, will have died.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Which is basically what we had until the rise of FOSS during the last century. Plenty of commercial software had source available to at least a big portion of its stack. Either in extra floppies or paying a bit extra. And there was the whole variations of shareware and PD.
pjmlp 6y ago
And in the process their sponsors will find out what the world of shareware and public domain was all about during the last century. GPL will sorely missed by FOSS advocates when it's gone.
belorn 6y ago
A company can limit themselves to only use technology that exist in the public domain or has no conditions applied. I would however question how effective that is in term of competition in a competitive market where smaller and more agile companies can leverage the ability to internally use GPL in order to push out products faster and cheaper without wasting unnecessary time to re-implement tools used internally. As a example, I have never seen a gaming company having internal policy against GPL. Developers are limited in including software that would disrupt the primary business model, but otherwise limiting developers on what they can do when experimenting or internally developing would only delay launches and steal developer time which could be allocated to improve the game.

baybal2 6y ago

They are free to use something other than Linux, or GPL software. This is pretty much what an opensource is, don't like GPL, go get some code not under it. The much of the *BSD family whose pretty much only point of existence over GNU was its use of permissive license is there laying around, with their devs almost begging for somebody to take their code, and fund their work. And still, how many of those companies went, and chose FreeBSD over Linux? Not many, very likely just single digits. Most continue skulking, squabbling, crying, facing lawsuits, lose money, face, but they still continue to bite the bitter fruit, which is Linux. The simple truth is that they have no alternative to Linux, and they don't have resources to make an OS of their own, or bring the numerous permissively licensed "Linux killers" to usable state.

pjmlp 6y ago
Sony, Apple, with endless contributions back to upstream. /s
andi999 6y ago
I chose it (now back on windows, different story...). The GUI/xserve configuration was problematic. To me, I think bsd is great for servers, but for Desktop less usable then linux.
outsomnia 6y ago
> And still, how many of those guys went, and chose FreeBSD over Linux? Well, Apple is at 14% of the smartphone market globally and that's derived from BSD, Macs are smaller but also BSD. The OS is just one case, it's hard to catch up with Linux, but that has not stopped Fuschia (BSD/MIT/Apache) and proprietary, nor SaaS where Linux powers it but is not "distributed" in GPL terms. The shape of the future is people are stopping feeding the GPL commons in favour of permissive licenses that the $$$ wants https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/open-source-licenses-trends-and-predictions https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/o... shows over half of projects in 2019 are MIT /Apache vs GPL(s), and a steady decline in even GPL3 usage. I don't know what should be done about enforcement but I do know these realities have to be factored into any useful considering about that.
- baybal2 6y ago
  I have no idea how that insinuation came upon that opensource is somehow "abandoning GPL." GPL was, is, and will likely be the de-facto one, and only license people call an opensource license for as long as we talk about serious projects outside of webdev realm. The statistics is skewed as of recently because of the overabundance of GitHub one day projects.
- jabl 6y ago
  > The shape of the future is people are stopping feeding the GPL commons in favour of permissive licenses that the $$$ wants https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/o https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/o... shows over half of projects in 2019 are MIT /Apache vs GPL(s), and a steady decline in even GPL3 usage. Yes, that's how it looks. In the long term, I think that will turn out to be a Faustian bargain for users and hackers. It will be the world the commercial software devs want; a large pool of permissively licensed software that they can pick and choose from to assemble $$$ products (with a number of useful idiots and sometimes even businesses contributing to maintaining the underlying pieces), without having to worry about contributing anything back. But the dream of a Free Software computing experience, where you can inspect and modify every part of the software you run, will have died.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Which is basically what we had until the rise of FOSS during the last century. Plenty of commercial software had source available to at least a big portion of its stack. Either in extra floppies or paying a bit extra. And there was the whole variations of shareware and PD.

pjmlp 6y ago

And in the process their sponsors will find out what the world of shareware and public domain was all about during the last century. GPL will sorely missed by FOSS advocates when it's gone.

belorn 6y ago

A company can limit themselves to only use technology that exist in the public domain or has no conditions applied. I would however question how effective that is in term of competition in a competitive market where smaller and more agile companies can leverage the ability to internally use GPL in order to push out products faster and cheaper without wasting unnecessary time to re-implement tools used internally. As a example, I have never seen a gaming company having internal policy against GPL. Developers are limited in including software that would disrupt the primary business model, but otherwise limiting developers on what they can do when experimenting or internally developing would only delay launches and steal developer time which could be allocated to improve the game.