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I think this is largely an illusion. Most open-source software isn't that successful, so it might seem like the choice of license didn't really matter for their

I think this is largely an illusion. Most open-source software isn't that successful, so it might seem like the choice of license didn't really matter for their success. But you'll notice that all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking (the article mostly hinges on such a case - LLVM). The author talks about GPL projects feeding back on themselves to create technological dominance. But it's much more than that. GPL encourages organizational dominance, too. It starts with watch dogs looking out for GPL violations. And it ends with a big nonprofit foundation providing training and paying developer's salaries. Why did Linux blast past BSD? The popular story is that some company was trying to claim ownership over BSD. But the same thing happened to Linux a decade or so later with SCO. I think the license created a no-win situation for anyone who wanted to create their own Unix-based OS. If it wasn't Linux-compatible, it wasn't valuable. And nobody could keep up with Linux's rapid pace of development. So everyone gave up and started contributing to Linux, causing the pace of development to increase even more. Now, Linux has what, a million commits per year? Something insane like that. Try achieving that with a BSD license.

mdasen 1y ago
I think that the SCO threat to Linux also came at a time when Linux was pretty immune from such a threat. If it's the early-90s and there's two options in their infancy and one had AT&T (one of the 5 largest companies) threatening it, you'll go with the other. In 1993, you're not using BSD or Linux and making a choice between them. The legal threat weighs heavy there. When SCO sued IBM, people were already using Linux including one of the biggest and most trusted names in computing (at the time): IBM. Migrating away from something is a hard choice. Likewise, Linux had IBM's army of lawyers defending it (yes, BSD was defended by UC Berkeley, but the school could have easily folded over a project that wasn't part of the school's core mission). SCO also wasn't much of a threat - they were a dying company trying to win a case against the biggest names in the industry. It's a lot easier to spread FUD against something no one is currently using that has a viable alternative. In 1993, Linux and BSD may have been equal, but AT&T's legal threat carried weight. People choosing one or the other weren't already using one. By 2003, 25% of the internet was powered by Linux. People were already using it and weren't going to be scared away by the claims of a dying corporation while powerful companies were defending Linux. You say yourself that if something wasn't Linux compatible, it wasn't valuable and so everyone had to be chasing and reimplementing Linux compatibility. But if BSD had been established for a decade and Linux was chasing BSD compatibility in 2003 and then SCO sued BSD, BSD would still have maintained dominance. When a company claimed ownership matters. Which company claimed ownership matters. "How big" the OS was when the challenge came matters. Frankly, reset Linux adoption to 0. Have everyone use BSD for 2-4 years. Then reintroduce Linux. You won't end up with Linux dominance. You'll end up with BSD dominance. Linux had a multi-year head start. As you note, once you become the dominant target, everyone else is chasing you. If BSD had a multi-year head start, Linux would have been chasing BSD and the roles would be swapped.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  SCO was suing on two grounds. First was the claim that they were the corporate heirs of the AT&T copyrights, and they claimed that Linux infringed on them. Second was from a joint development agreement with IBM - they claimed that code from that had been contributed to Linux by IBM, and that IBM didn't have the right because it was half SCO's code (or rather, Novell's code that SCO inherited). That second claim could not have happened until IBM was contributing to Linux. That part of the lawsuit could not have happened in 1993. (The first part was similar to the BSD lawsuit.)
Expurple 1y ago
> all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking (the article mostly hinges on such a case - LLVM). Another comment trivially points out that this isn't true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607038
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  Those are the big open-source projects?
  - Expurple 1y ago
    Are you seriously trying to imply that Firefox and Chromium aren't big open-source projects? Define "big" then. "Literally only Linux"?
    - phendrenad2 1y ago
      Believe it or not, I think those are exceptions. Firefox is controlled opposition, paid $400 million per year by Google. They would have died long ago if it weren't for that little detail. Chrome is 100% owned by one corporation, and its very existence is a freemium gimmick to acquire users, and it was only open-source because Google was the "do no evil" company and wanted to stand on the high ground. Do you seriously think they LIKE Brave and de-googled Chromium existing? It's actually hard to find organically-grown large FOSS projects, that weren't funded as part of some company's corporate moat. But my argument is, if you find them, they're mostly GPL.
      - Expurple 1y ago
        That's a different argument, unrelated to the one that I originally responded to: > > all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking I don't see how your argument is relevant to that, or how it disputes the article. The article is not about funding or "organic growth". It's about survival characteristics and winning the mainstream. Blink, WebKit, and Gecko are all a mixture of permissive and weak copyleft licenses. There are no popular GPL browser engines. There are no popular proprietary browser engines. That's exactly the outcome that the article predicts! (Of course, it doesn't need to "predict" the most popular browser engines specifically. In 2015, they already looked similar and had a similar moat). Although I have to admit now, we'd probably see proprietary browser engines if it wasn't for the "weak copyleft" part. Now I think that it's actually the most long-term competitive license type for some projects! If we continue with the topic of web browsers, then we'll see a seemingly strong counter-example: the most popular browsers are proprietary, and have been for a long time. But that's a thin layer on top of a larger open foundation. A thin layer is easy to replicate and compete against. Thus, Chromium and Firefox shells are maintained (and kept competitive) just fine. They are less popular than Chrome or Edge, but not because they are less maintained or broadly inferior (they may be for specific tasks). They are long-term viable options that aren't going away. > Firefox is controlled opposition, paid $400 million per year by Google. They would have died long ago if it weren't for that little detail. Depends on how you define "died". Broadly, I disagree. Too many developers are interested in the existence of Firefox. According to an Igalia employee [1], during the first half of 2024, 10.71% of contributions to mozilla-central came from Igalia, and another 8.74% came from Red Hat. I wanted to see an aggregate share of Mozilla employees (which must be even less than the remaining 80%), but I couldn't find that. But anyway, even if Firefox died, that wouldn't be related to its license (and this article) at all. Chromium and WebKit have similar licenses. > But my argument is, if you find them, they're mostly GPL. That may be true if you artificially limit yourself to non-corporate-driven projects. But that's not what the article is about. And that distinction is irrelevant to me, too. If the "official" corporate-driven fork turns into something that I dislike, I have the freedom to switch to a community-maintanied fork (for popular projects, usually there is one) or fork the project myself. Or, I put up with the non-ideal corporate project if it's still the most attractive option. Being community-driven isn't a guarantee that the project will always be maintained and that the maintainers will always agree with you and put your use cases and needs above others. [1]: https://bkardell.com/blog/2024-Midseason.html https://bkardell.com/blog/2024-Midseason.html

mdasen 1y ago

I think that the SCO threat to Linux also came at a time when Linux was pretty immune from such a threat. If it's the early-90s and there's two options in their infancy and one had AT&T (one of the 5 largest companies) threatening it, you'll go with the other. In 1993, you're not using BSD or Linux and making a choice between them. The legal threat weighs heavy there. When SCO sued IBM, people were already using Linux including one of the biggest and most trusted names in computing (at the time): IBM. Migrating away from something is a hard choice. Likewise, Linux had IBM's army of lawyers defending it (yes, BSD was defended by UC Berkeley, but the school could have easily folded over a project that wasn't part of the school's core mission). SCO also wasn't much of a threat - they were a dying company trying to win a case against the biggest names in the industry. It's a lot easier to spread FUD against something no one is currently using that has a viable alternative. In 1993, Linux and BSD may have been equal, but AT&T's legal threat carried weight. People choosing one or the other weren't already using one. By 2003, 25% of the internet was powered by Linux. People were already using it and weren't going to be scared away by the claims of a dying corporation while powerful companies were defending Linux. You say yourself that if something wasn't Linux compatible, it wasn't valuable and so everyone had to be chasing and reimplementing Linux compatibility. But if BSD had been established for a decade and Linux was chasing BSD compatibility in 2003 and then SCO sued BSD, BSD would still have maintained dominance. When a company claimed ownership matters. Which company claimed ownership matters. "How big" the OS was when the challenge came matters. Frankly, reset Linux adoption to 0. Have everyone use BSD for 2-4 years. Then reintroduce Linux. You won't end up with Linux dominance. You'll end up with BSD dominance. Linux had a multi-year head start. As you note, once you become the dominant target, everyone else is chasing you. If BSD had a multi-year head start, Linux would have been chasing BSD and the roles would be swapped.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago
SCO was suing on two grounds. First was the claim that they were the corporate heirs of the AT&T copyrights, and they claimed that Linux infringed on them. Second was from a joint development agreement with IBM - they claimed that code from that had been contributed to Linux by IBM, and that IBM didn't have the right because it was half SCO's code (or rather, Novell's code that SCO inherited). That second claim could not have happened until IBM was contributing to Linux. That part of the lawsuit could not have happened in 1993. (The first part was similar to the BSD lawsuit.)

Expurple 1y ago

> all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking (the article mostly hinges on such a case - LLVM). Another comment trivially points out that this isn't true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607038

phendrenad2 1y ago
Those are the big open-source projects?
- Expurple 1y ago
  Are you seriously trying to imply that Firefox and Chromium aren't big open-source projects? Define "big" then. "Literally only Linux"?
  - phendrenad2 1y ago
    Believe it or not, I think those are exceptions. Firefox is controlled opposition, paid $400 million per year by Google. They would have died long ago if it weren't for that little detail. Chrome is 100% owned by one corporation, and its very existence is a freemium gimmick to acquire users, and it was only open-source because Google was the "do no evil" company and wanted to stand on the high ground. Do you seriously think they LIKE Brave and de-googled Chromium existing? It's actually hard to find organically-grown large FOSS projects, that weren't funded as part of some company's corporate moat. But my argument is, if you find them, they're mostly GPL.
    - Expurple 1y ago
      That's a different argument, unrelated to the one that I originally responded to: > > all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking I don't see how your argument is relevant to that, or how it disputes the article. The article is not about funding or "organic growth". It's about survival characteristics and winning the mainstream. Blink, WebKit, and Gecko are all a mixture of permissive and weak copyleft licenses. There are no popular GPL browser engines. There are no popular proprietary browser engines. That's exactly the outcome that the article predicts! (Of course, it doesn't need to "predict" the most popular browser engines specifically. In 2015, they already looked similar and had a similar moat). Although I have to admit now, we'd probably see proprietary browser engines if it wasn't for the "weak copyleft" part. Now I think that it's actually the most long-term competitive license type for some projects! If we continue with the topic of web browsers, then we'll see a seemingly strong counter-example: the most popular browsers are proprietary, and have been for a long time. But that's a thin layer on top of a larger open foundation. A thin layer is easy to replicate and compete against. Thus, Chromium and Firefox shells are maintained (and kept competitive) just fine. They are less popular than Chrome or Edge, but not because they are less maintained or broadly inferior (they may be for specific tasks). They are long-term viable options that aren't going away. > Firefox is controlled opposition, paid $400 million per year by Google. They would have died long ago if it weren't for that little detail. Depends on how you define "died". Broadly, I disagree. Too many developers are interested in the existence of Firefox. According to an Igalia employee [1], during the first half of 2024, 10.71% of contributions to mozilla-central came from Igalia, and another 8.74% came from Red Hat. I wanted to see an aggregate share of Mozilla employees (which must be even less than the remaining 80%), but I couldn't find that. But anyway, even if Firefox died, that wouldn't be related to its license (and this article) at all. Chromium and WebKit have similar licenses. > But my argument is, if you find them, they're mostly GPL. That may be true if you artificially limit yourself to non-corporate-driven projects. But that's not what the article is about. And that distinction is irrelevant to me, too. If the "official" corporate-driven fork turns into something that I dislike, I have the freedom to switch to a community-maintanied fork (for popular projects, usually there is one) or fork the project myself. Or, I put up with the non-ideal corporate project if it's still the most attractive option. Being community-driven isn't a guarantee that the project will always be maintained and that the maintainers will always agree with you and put your use cases and needs above others. [1]: https://bkardell.com/blog/2024-Midseason.html https://bkardell.com/blog/2024-Midseason.html