3 ms·
It's difficult to say. In some ways, the GPL reassured anyone participating in the Linux ecosystem that no one company was going to make a play for the whole th
by davidw 5y ago
It's difficult to say. In some ways, the GPL reassured anyone participating in the Linux ecosystem that no one company was going to make a play for the whole thing by hiring up key people and running with it as a proprietary system or some kind of "open core" thing where much of it was free but the fancy bits were proprietary.
- flomo 5y agoThere was some crossover between open source *BSD and a closed source OS called BSDi. So this fear was not totally unjustified. Also people were still burned from the "Unix Wars", where closed-source BSD variants played a major role. So there was the feeling that GPL would discourage incompatible forks.
- pjmlp 5y agoAs if modern Linux distributions are super compatible among themselves.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoAren't they? Not binary compatible, but you should be able to compile more or less the same software on any GNU/Linux unless you're missing dependencies.
- pjmlp 5y agoPackaging, file locations, init systems, desktop stack in use, ...