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Linux has a LOT of paid commercial developers. Imagine those companies closed source and produced a commercial kernel that's way ahead of the open one - because

Linux has a LOT of paid commercial developers. Imagine those companies closed source and produced a commercial kernel that's way ahead of the open one - because they could and would if the license allowed. The public code couldn't keep up and would be kind of useless. On the other hand, the scenario you describe where everybody wins is already proven to work with the GPL since that is the Linux story. That is the point of it - when everyone cooperates we all win.

yencabulator 3y ago
I just don't think this is a huge threat. If there's a viable open source community, detaching your proprietary kernel from it just causes your company to be stuck with an old version, not able to benefit from the larger development community. There are already plenty of de facto proprietary forks of Linux. Practically every embedded SDK comes with one. Yes they have to publish the source because of the GPL, but they never bother doing that in a form that helps getting any of the work merged into upstream Linux. All those vendor-specific forks end up stuck at some random old kernel with dozens of known issues, effectively abandoned. This has effectively ruined the ARM landscape, and of the end-user visible SBC choices only RPi has a decent reputation for working well enough with upstream Linux devs. Submitting your changes to upstream Linux is a competitive advantage. (With the trade-off that you can't hide your sooper sekrit hardware designs as well.) Google/Android has put in a huge amount of effort to drag the hardware vendors out of this pit where they get stuck on old kernel versions...
hnfong 3y ago
Interesting you mentioned GPL proven to work in the Linux story. It was specifically GPLv2. I feel the GPL lost a lot of momentum with FSF's GPLv3 push. Linus was publicly against it. Not only for Linux, but generally and philosophically against it. I presume a lot of others felt the same too. In theory you could continue using GPLv2 for new projects, but given that FSF had basically deprecated v2 in favor of v3, it seems that the momentum for v2 just slowly died out, and v3 was too controversial to gain widespread acceptance. Without a GPL default, the developers who didn't want to get too deeply involved in ideological questions probably just adopted MIT as the new default.

yencabulator 3y ago

I just don't think this is a huge threat. If there's a viable open source community, detaching your proprietary kernel from it just causes your company to be stuck with an old version, not able to benefit from the larger development community. There are already plenty of de facto proprietary forks of Linux. Practically every embedded SDK comes with one. Yes they have to publish the source because of the GPL, but they never bother doing that in a form that helps getting any of the work merged into upstream Linux. All those vendor-specific forks end up stuck at some random old kernel with dozens of known issues, effectively abandoned. This has effectively ruined the ARM landscape, and of the end-user visible SBC choices only RPi has a decent reputation for working well enough with upstream Linux devs. Submitting your changes to upstream Linux is a competitive advantage. (With the trade-off that you can't hide your sooper sekrit hardware designs as well.) Google/Android has put in a huge amount of effort to drag the hardware vendors out of this pit where they get stuck on old kernel versions...

hnfong 3y ago

Interesting you mentioned GPL proven to work in the Linux story. It was specifically GPLv2. I feel the GPL lost a lot of momentum with FSF's GPLv3 push. Linus was publicly against it. Not only for Linux, but generally and philosophically against it. I presume a lot of others felt the same too. In theory you could continue using GPLv2 for new projects, but given that FSF had basically deprecated v2 in favor of v3, it seems that the momentum for v2 just slowly died out, and v3 was too controversial to gain widespread acceptance. Without a GPL default, the developers who didn't want to get too deeply involved in ideological questions probably just adopted MIT as the new default.