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I'd have to go with what I consider to be the cautionary tale of FreeBSD, which was far more popular before Apple decided to use it for their OS X kernel withou
by cjbprime 14y ago
I'd have to go with what I consider to be the cautionary tale of FreeBSD, which was far more popular before Apple decided to use it for their OS X kernel without giving anything back, and now seems to have no modern relevance at all. I think it's a pretty good anecdotal argument in favor of the GPL on consequentialist grounds.
- kaolinite 14y agoFreeBSD is still used! In fact, it's one of the more innovative OSes. There are tonnes of features in FreeBSD that just aren't available in any other OS. I highly doubt Apple had anything to do with its diminishing popularity, however. In fact, I would say it's due more to the increase in virtualisation (which FreeBSD does not perform well at in comparison to Linux) and the increase in user-friendly Linux distributions (FreeBSD is trickier to set up; that was ok when Linux was tricky too).
- jyap 14y agoNon-GPL licenses such as MIT and BSD are very popular in realms such as iOS programming. FreeBSD is also still very popular. The decline in popularity of FreeBSD would be more so to do with the rise in popularity and maturity of Linux and packaged Linux distributions.