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> 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, Ma

> 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.

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.