4 ms·

If Windows 10 was built on top of Linux I'd get a lot more excited. GPL would make that impossible. There are reasons OS X is based on BSD, and not all of the

If Windows 10 was built on top of Linux I'd get a lot more excited. GPL would make that impossible. There are reasons OS X is based on BSD, and not all of them are about technical superiority.

cwyers 12y ago
Android is built on Linux, and it seems to do just fine despite the kernel being GPL'd.
- 0x0 12y ago
  "just fine" isn't perfectly true. The bionic interface they somehow "wash" from GPL headers to BSD headers is questionable.
  - dezgeg 12y ago
    Nope, there is nothing questionable about it. Linus himself has stated it: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20110322014831856 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20110322014831...
    - 0x0 12y ago
      That's interesting. Still, there are a huge number of copyright holders of the linux kernel and some may have a different opinion on the legalese applies.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
wfjackson 12y ago
WebOS and Jolla had/have a ton of closed source components(pretty much the whole GUI) but run on top of Linux so there's a loophole somehere.
- dezgeg 12y ago
  There is no loophole, the Linux license explicitly allows usermode apps to use the (GPL-licensed) interface headers without requiring the app to be GPL. See https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/COPYING https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/COPYING
72deluxe 12y ago
And would all Windows developers leave? Most I bump into see Linux as a toy still, despite the ever-growing army of vocal Python developers who favour development on the platform (if you love slow GUI programs, Python sure is the way to go!)