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Do you have examples of undesirable situations arising that would not have been prevented by selecting the GPL instead of a permissive license?

by ummonk 1y ago

heavyset_go 1y ago
FreeBSD and Sony's PlayStation, Nintendo's Switch and Apple's macOS/iOS. Compare this to Steam's SteamOS, Proton, etc, all of which are built on top of copyleft software, and everyone benefits from it. I'm not a Steam customer or SteamOS user, but Steam's changes to Wine help me out everyday. Similarly, Steam's use of Linux on their Steam Deck has lead to kernel changes that benefit all Linux users with AMD hardware. Meanwhile, you can't even use modern WiFi or Bluetooth on FreeBSD despite platforms built on top of it all having solved that problem a decade, or more, ago
- reactordev 1y ago
  Don’t bash FreeBSD, it’s not their fault. It’s entirely the fault of the corporations that decided not to trunk their changes upstream for the betterment of the community. Their bespoke flavor of BSD dies with them.
  - ummonk 1y ago
    GP’s point is that the corporations would have been forced to open source their changes (thus allowing FreeBSD to incorporate them) if FreeBSD had been GPL-licensed. I disagree of course, as FreeBSD has benefited significantly from corporate adoption —- especially Apple’s porting of FreeBSD userland —- and that corporate adoption would never have occurred had FreeBSD not distinguished itself from Linux by being permissive licensed.
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    I agree with both of your points. My point is that you can't rely on the goodwill of corporations when you're building the commons. They will happily wall off the commons you and others cultivated for themselves. They need to be incentivized into being good citizens instead of just mooching. Maybe if companies were incentivized to give back to FreeBSD, it could be a viable competitor to Linux when it comes to hardware and standards we've taken for granted for the last two decades. That's a world I'd rather live in.

Do you have examples of undesirable situations arising that would not have been prevented by selecting the GPL instead of a permissive license?

by ummonk 1y ago

Do you have examples of undesirable situations arising that would not have been prevented by selecting the GPL instead of a permissive license?

heavyset_go 1y ago

FreeBSD and Sony's PlayStation, Nintendo's Switch and Apple's macOS/iOS. Compare this to Steam's SteamOS, Proton, etc, all of which are built on top of copyleft software, and everyone benefits from it. I'm not a Steam customer or SteamOS user, but Steam's changes to Wine help me out everyday. Similarly, Steam's use of Linux on their Steam Deck has lead to kernel changes that benefit all Linux users with AMD hardware. Meanwhile, you can't even use modern WiFi or Bluetooth on FreeBSD despite platforms built on top of it all having solved that problem a decade, or more, ago

reactordev 1y ago
Don’t bash FreeBSD, it’s not their fault. It’s entirely the fault of the corporations that decided not to trunk their changes upstream for the betterment of the community. Their bespoke flavor of BSD dies with them.
- ummonk 1y ago
  GP’s point is that the corporations would have been forced to open source their changes (thus allowing FreeBSD to incorporate them) if FreeBSD had been GPL-licensed. I disagree of course, as FreeBSD has benefited significantly from corporate adoption —- especially Apple’s porting of FreeBSD userland —- and that corporate adoption would never have occurred had FreeBSD not distinguished itself from Linux by being permissive licensed.
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  I agree with both of your points. My point is that you can't rely on the goodwill of corporations when you're building the commons. They will happily wall off the commons you and others cultivated for themselves. They need to be incentivized into being good citizens instead of just mooching. Maybe if companies were incentivized to give back to FreeBSD, it could be a viable competitor to Linux when it comes to hardware and standards we've taken for granted for the last two decades. That's a world I'd rather live in.