4 ms·

> without copyleft we might not have the fertile collaboration of projects such as Linux, git Why would this be the case? FreeBSD and SVN were developed withou

by jephir 10y ago

> without copyleft we might not have the fertile collaboration of projects such as Linux, git Why would this be the case? FreeBSD and SVN were developed without copyleft. GPL is not necessary to get people to contribute to open source.

appleflaxen 10y ago
Apple seems like a good example of where someone made a proprietary fork of a non-left license, and made only trivial contributions back.
- gsnedders 10y ago
  NeXT's usage of BSD predates BSD being available under any open source license, and as such macOS/iOS's use of it seems like a direct consequence of that rather than it being under a non-left license.
  - appleflaxen 10y ago
    I don't understand why the license at the time is relevant. The point is that if it had been copyleft, they would be required to contribute back. It wasn't, so they weren't and didn't.
greyman 10y ago
This wasn't a particularly good counterexample, since Linux is more advanced and successful than FreeBSD, and same can by said about git.
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  By which metric is Linux more advanced than FreeBSD? Companies like Netflix use FreeBSD because its networking stack blows Linux out of the water. Further, how about Xorg, Apache, BIND, Nginx, etc? Significant amounts of userland tools and applications are written under more liberal licenses.
- techdragon 10y ago
  FreeBSD had "containers" aka Jails, more than a decade before Linux. Linux is merely more popular than FreeBSD, and that popularity has zero influence on its quality, I'd argue it might even have a negative impact on its quality in a statistical sense, when you take into consideration all the badly maintained SoC implementations of Linux.
e12e 10y ago
I was under the impression that FreeBSD for years depended on GNU GCC for compilation? In which case I think it's somewhat (if not completely) misleading to say that "FreeBSD ... [was] developed without copyleft.". http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwMjI http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwMjI

by jephir 10y ago

appleflaxen 10y ago

Apple seems like a good example of where someone made a proprietary fork of a non-left license, and made only trivial contributions back.

gsnedders 10y ago
NeXT's usage of BSD predates BSD being available under any open source license, and as such macOS/iOS's use of it seems like a direct consequence of that rather than it being under a non-left license.
- appleflaxen 10y ago
  I don't understand why the license at the time is relevant. The point is that if it had been copyleft, they would be required to contribute back. It wasn't, so they weren't and didn't.

greyman 10y ago

This wasn't a particularly good counterexample, since Linux is more advanced and successful than FreeBSD, and same can by said about git.

Sanddancer 10y ago
By which metric is Linux more advanced than FreeBSD? Companies like Netflix use FreeBSD because its networking stack blows Linux out of the water. Further, how about Xorg, Apache, BIND, Nginx, etc? Significant amounts of userland tools and applications are written under more liberal licenses.
techdragon 10y ago
FreeBSD had "containers" aka Jails, more than a decade before Linux. Linux is merely more popular than FreeBSD, and that popularity has zero influence on its quality, I'd argue it might even have a negative impact on its quality in a statistical sense, when you take into consideration all the badly maintained SoC implementations of Linux.

e12e 10y ago

I was under the impression that FreeBSD for years depended on GNU GCC for compilation? In which case I think it's somewhat (if not completely) misleading to say that "FreeBSD ... [was] developed without copyleft.". http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwMjI http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwMjI