alt Hacker NewsI think GCC is the real shining example of a GPL success, it broke through a rut of high cost developer tooling in the 1990s and became the de facto compiler for UNIX and embedded BSPs (Board Support Packages) while training corporations on how to deal with all this.
But then LLVM showed up and showed it is no longer imperative to have a viral license to sustain corporate OSS. That might've not been possible without the land clearing GCC accomplished, but times are different now and corporations have a better understanding and relationship with OSS.
The GPL has enough area to opt out of contributing (i.e. services businesses or just stacking on immense complexity in a BSP so as to ensure vendor lockin) that it isn't a defining concern for most users.
Therefore I don't think Linux' success has much to do with GPL. It has been effective in the BSP space, but the main parts most people care about and associate with Linux could easily be MIT with no significant consequence on velocity and participation. In fact, a lot of the DRM code (graphics drivers) are dual-licensed thusly.
> But then LLVM showed up and showed it is no longer imperative to have a viral license
I am not sure I remember everything right, but as far as I remember Apple originally maintained a fork of gcc for its objective-c language and didn't provide clean patches upstream, instead it threw its weight behind LLVM the moment it became even remotely viable so it could avoid the issue entirely.
Also gcc didn't provide APIs for IDE integration early on, causing significant issues with attempts to implement features like refactoring support on top of it. People had the choice of either using llvm, half ass it with ctags or stick with plain text search and replace like RMS intended.