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There is no business in commercial forks of Xorg because there are no commercial Unices anymore. And their demise coincides with growth of GNU/Linux (as in "GNU
by qb45 14y ago
There is no business in commercial forks of Xorg because there are no commercial Unices anymore. And their demise coincides with growth of GNU/Linux (as in "GNU userland running on top of Linux-the-kernel").
As for LLVM, the only companies selling commercial compilers specialize in HPC, embedded or other narrow markets and they have no reason to fork LLVM because in their niches they are better. Apple and Google contribute to LLVM because they use it and it benetifts them. And BTW, LLVM wasn't the project which killed commercial general purpose C compilers.
The importance of GPL lies in its ability to "open-source" whole software domains and put them in the hands of their users, at which point the choice of license becomes less important.
- fafner 14y agoExactly! GPL levelled the field. BSD has been around for much longer than Linux and is very widely used. All commercial Unices and even Windows contain code from BSD but the *BSDs are still lacking contributions and funding. People always complain about RMS' decision to make GCC a complex interconnected bundle. Sure right now it's a stupid decision and the GCC folks have to work on breaking it up. But the decision has to bee seen with the historic context. But there are simply many people here who think of themselves as hotshot entrepreneurs and take plenty of code without contributing back. I know I know ... they released their implementation of the x hundred nodejs logging library under MIT license. What a huge contribution to society! ...
- LukeShu 14y agoWait, when dig GCC come in to this? I'm not sure what GCC has to do with anything else you said.