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I don't think there's "right" and "wrong", but bizarre (entitled?) expectations. A natural part of Open Source is that someone may come in and make way more mon
by tolmasky 6y ago
I don't think there's "right" and "wrong", but bizarre (entitled?) expectations. A natural part of Open Source is that someone may come in and make way more money off of something than you do. In fact, Amazon makes way more money off of Linux than Linus ever did. But you don't even have to go that far, many completely unrelated YC companies made way more money off of Linux than Linus did, and could arguably have not pulled that off without Linux being a free OS that you don't even have to think about since it's so ingrained in hosting. But when the intent of Open Source is "to increase the quality of software around the world", this is considered a good result. However, when the intent of Open Source is some nebulous initial hyper-growth to then hope you can offer hosting, the expectations just aren't set correctly. Unfortunately, the open source strategy does not magically offer the right result based on the intent of the author.
If Linus all of a sudden woke up tomorrow and said "Hey, I just realized that I'm not being paid a cut by literally every single company in Silicon Valley, that is NOT OK, I am going to shift gears and remove non-contributor code and start releasing Linux as closed source from now on", I feel people would be less forgiving than they are to these much less impactful companies. But Linus would be as "right" as they are, arguably more so.
Many of these companies are simply learning that maybe all those "dinosaurs" of the 90s might have been onto something with commercial licensing, which ultimately seems to be what they actually want: to charge money for their software. Sure, it doesn't get you free contributions and ready-made communities, but it gets you money, which is what a company is supposed to do. And that's fine! It's just not Open Source.
- HotHotLava 6y agoLinus' original license did forbid making any money off the kernel: > - You may not distibute[sic] this for a fee, not even "handling" costs. Also I think the GPL was pretty important to the kernel, since many companies, especially in the 90s, probably would have kept contributions private and their code closed without that gentle push.
- pjmlp 6y agoWithout it, we would have all the big UNIXes still around, adopting BSD code as they already were doing.
- jabl 6y agoMaybe they would still be around in some form, yes, although the mass market advantages of x86 would still have killed of the traditional RISC Unix workstation market etc. OTOH maybe eventually most people would have switched to FreeBSD (or whatever free *BSD would have been the "mainstream" choice), just like they switched to Linux in our universe, since they thought that whatever value add provided by some proprietary unix wasn't worth it anymore. In a hypothetical copyleft-free universe, sure, there would be a lot more companies using OSS to create proprietary products without having to think about what is a derivative work, linking and distribution restrictions. OTOH all those proprietary companies playing the "commodify your complement" game against each other would ensure that the quantity and quantity of OSS would continually be increasing as well, forcing those companies to continually innovate lest they lose their market to the free OSS alternatives. To repeat, hypothetically speaking, as we don't have an alternate universe to run such experiments in.
- jabl 6y ago> ... the quantity and quantity of OSS ... This should be "quantity and quality"
- pjmlp 6y agoBut we kind of do, BSDs are enjoying lots of upstream changes from Apple and Sony. And in what concerns x86, they would just support it as well, as Solaris did. HP-UX and Aix also have supported a couple of CPU architectures, as did some of the others. Just Irix was kind of married with MIPS. Or Windows would just have won the x86 server room instead. In any case, there are a couple of major surviving GPL projects, all competition against Linux on the IoT space are BSD/MIT FOSS POSIX clones, ironically one of them being sponsored by Linux foundation (Zephyr), so those around in 20 years will get to appreciate how much of GPL will still be left around.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoI don’t see these as comparable. If Microsoft packaged up Linux and started selling Linux licenses, maybe? Elastic search being used in a product seems different from elastic search being the product. It’s not black and white, but there are real differences.
- tolmasky 6y agoI can’t imagine anything closer to “selling THE product” when it comes to Linux than AWS EC2. It’s Linux as a service on different virtual hardware options. It’s directly comparable to the AWS Elastic search service, which is Elastic search as a service on different virtual hardware options. The fact that this isn’t immediately obvious shows how much we take Linux for granted. Perhaps you mean when comparing to the “all Silicon Valley companies” I mentioned, but that still leaves AWS, GCP, Azure, Heroku, and every serverless provider out there as direct comparisons to this situation.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoAh yeah, I meant the comment about “literally every single company in Silicon Valley,” but now I see that was entirely ambiguous. I thought you meant like Facebook, google (minus GCP), Uber, Airbnb, etc profiting off of linux (and pandas and gcc and pytorch and Cpython and ...).