The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL. MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.
[–] craftkiller 1 day ago
[–] kevinrineer 1 day ago
[–] akimbostrawman 17 hours ago
You can know how much corporations put into MIT but never how much they extracted.
[–] Brian_K_White 1 day ago
If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.
What are the equivalent numbers for everything that was ever licenced GPL vs MIT? Neither of us knows but I defy you to even slightly attempt to hint that the world did not benefit from gpl code about a million times more than mit code as a direct result of their fundamental natures.
[–] craftkiller 1 day ago
My post proved that copyfree code bases actually do receive contributions back from the commercial users of their code. Certainly not 100% of users, but the same is true for the GPL. Every company I've worked for after college has used Linux extensively and none of them have contributed back to Linux in either patches or dollars.
Why do you both keep incorrectly referring to the license as "MIT"? The BSDs are under the various BSD licenses, not the MIT license. If you're trying to refer to the whole category then I would suggest using the words "copyleft" for GPL-style licenses and "copyfree" for BSD-style licenses.
> If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.
I would like to direct you to the HN guidelines since this is a clear violation of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[–] Brian_K_White 1 day ago
Numbers prove or disprove it. Which neither of us has. The fact that everything you showed even fits in a little comment like that compared to the scope of all software actually proves what a joke it was to even try to present this as any sort of argument.
"why do you keep saying MIT?" Oh FFS really? MIT, or BSD, is perfectly understandable shorthand for any of the mit/bsd/x11/etc in a general discussion like this. They are all of a class. How do you know? Because no one has attempted to discuss any fine points here that would make any of those any different from any of the others. You have to go out of your way to say they are different, and then cannot say in what way that matters or changes anything. So why do you yet again pretend an insignificant detail in any way affects the thrust of the argument?
Go ahead and substitute "MIT" with "BSD" or any of the specific "various BSD licences". Ok now that you did that, what changed? The argument was valid or invalid before, and the opposite now?
[–] craftkiller 1 day ago
[–] bigstrat2003 1 day ago
It does when the original claim was an absolute one. That's how logic works.
[–] bigstrat2003 1 day ago
Yes it does. The assertion was:
> MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.
Therefore, any number of contributions disprove the assertion.
[–] tehologist 1 day ago
[–] MaxBarraclough 1 day ago
Linus doesn't agree. He once said in an interview that making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did, [0] and has said that I love GPLv2. I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux because it enforced that you have to give back. [1]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070826212454/http:/www.tlug.jp...
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvaldss-love-hate-rela...
[–] spauldo 1 day ago
[–] MaxBarraclough 22 hours ago
[–] spauldo 16 hours ago
When Linus was talking about the GPL being part of Linux's success, he was talking about Linux's success in general. And yeah, the GPL most likely is a big part of Linux's success.
However, if 386BSD had been freely available in '91, Linux would likely never have had the opportunity to build the developer base needed to take it from a student's neat project to a viable operating system.
[–] bch 1 day ago
Linux succeeded where BSD was tied-up in a lawsuit[0] from AT&T and the fear of “picking the wrong horse” w BSD under threat allowed Linux to slide into public consciousness and installs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....
That's just obviously not true. Check out the commit history on FreeBSD and look at all the contributions from Netflix. Off the top of my head they contributed kTLS and asynchronous sendfile which made it such that a single syscall could send the full contents of a file over a socket even with TLS.
Grepping through the git logs for the "Sponsored by" lines shows these top results:
One company that isn't in that list but shows up as an author is Datto which gave us native encryption on ZFS (shout out to Tom for writing that!)