3 ms·

I feel a bit of history is slipping away. Linux forced a lot of companies and individuals to keep stuff together in a way that uniquely unified industry against

I feel a bit of history is slipping away. Linux forced a lot of companies and individuals to keep stuff together in a way that uniquely unified industry against Windows and custom embedded software stacks. Without the Linux kernel we’d have a bunch of competing proprietary forks bickering at every turn. You could have forgotten video drivers from major vendors like NVidia. Even with Linux it was an anomaly.

pjmlp 3y ago
Instead of UNIX wars, we now have Linux wars.
bluGill 3y ago
Huh? We have many competing forks - debian, redhat, ubutntu, arch... Sure there is mostly on kernel, but there is a lot more to an OS than a kernel. Linux didn't force anyone to keep stuff together. It just is to your advantage to work together most of the time. Anyone who didn't work together soon paid a price as something you want couldn't easily be brought to you.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  I may not make my point clearly - but I have seen from the inside how companies reluctantly use the Linux kernel because it's the industry standard and the board support package comes with Linux. If BSDs had won, there would have been very little incentive to upstream patches or provide source code to customers, but a lot of incentive to pitch the vendors proprietary additions as something special. Every company selling a solution would have been tempted to close off the source and not give anything back. Back then, it was a knee-jerk reaction to keep as much as possible in-house. Everything begins with hardware support. The standard distributions also all used glibc and GNU utilities which is also GPL. For the longest time all standard distributions were based on either RedHat or Debian. I think Linux shaped the industry in very special ways which would not have come naturally in a non-GPL world. Things today are by-and-large extremely open, with github etc being almost a force of nature, but my hunch is that this outcome was not a given which would have just have happened in some kind of manifest-destiny way. I think the world could easily have tipped into a much more proprieraty path without GNU and Linux.
  - arp242 3y ago
    It seems to me the incentive is mostly that it costs tons of effort to maintain these things in-house, and that it doesn't actually hurt the business to share (most) things. Does copyleft help? Perhaps, but that's not clear to me. There are tons of successful non-copyleft projects so copyleft certainly doesn't seem to be a requirement, and look at how many companies are violating the GPL and basically just keep doing it. While GPL suits do happen (just last week in France), in general they're exceedingly rare, and the risk consists of a bit of negative publicity among a small number of people. All of this is of course an old discussion, and to be fair I don't think anyone can be sure of anything here which is why people have been discussing this for 30 years. Basically we'd have to construct an alternative universe to be sure.

pjmlp 3y ago

Instead of UNIX wars, we now have Linux wars.

bluGill 3y ago

Huh? We have many competing forks - debian, redhat, ubutntu, arch... Sure there is mostly on kernel, but there is a lot more to an OS than a kernel. Linux didn't force anyone to keep stuff together. It just is to your advantage to work together most of the time. Anyone who didn't work together soon paid a price as something you want couldn't easily be brought to you.

actionfromafar 3y ago
I may not make my point clearly - but I have seen from the inside how companies reluctantly use the Linux kernel because it's the industry standard and the board support package comes with Linux. If BSDs had won, there would have been very little incentive to upstream patches or provide source code to customers, but a lot of incentive to pitch the vendors proprietary additions as something special. Every company selling a solution would have been tempted to close off the source and not give anything back. Back then, it was a knee-jerk reaction to keep as much as possible in-house. Everything begins with hardware support. The standard distributions also all used glibc and GNU utilities which is also GPL. For the longest time all standard distributions were based on either RedHat or Debian. I think Linux shaped the industry in very special ways which would not have come naturally in a non-GPL world. Things today are by-and-large extremely open, with github etc being almost a force of nature, but my hunch is that this outcome was not a given which would have just have happened in some kind of manifest-destiny way. I think the world could easily have tipped into a much more proprieraty path without GNU and Linux.
- arp242 3y ago
  It seems to me the incentive is mostly that it costs tons of effort to maintain these things in-house, and that it doesn't actually hurt the business to share (most) things. Does copyleft help? Perhaps, but that's not clear to me. There are tons of successful non-copyleft projects so copyleft certainly doesn't seem to be a requirement, and look at how many companies are violating the GPL and basically just keep doing it. While GPL suits do happen (just last week in France), in general they're exceedingly rare, and the risk consists of a bit of negative publicity among a small number of people. All of this is of course an old discussion, and to be fair I don't think anyone can be sure of anything here which is why people have been discussing this for 30 years. Basically we'd have to construct an alternative universe to be sure.