I have seen this particular idea come up a lot lately.

Personaly I think Intel's early investment in linux had a lot to do with it. They also sold a compiler and marketed to labs and such which bought chips. So linux compatibility meant a lot to decision makers.

AMD the underdog went more in on Linux compat than NVIDIA. Which may have been a business decsion.

I dunno, maybe the GPL effect was more a market share thing with developers than a copyleft thing.

Nota Bene: I do love copyleft and license all my own projects AGPL

> but I believe that success Linux has had is because of copyleft

No, the success Linux has had is because it ran on the machines people had at home, and was very easy to try out.

An instructive example would be my own path into Linux: I started with DJGPP, but got annoyed because it couldn't multi-task (if you started a compilation within an IDE like Emacs, you had to wait until it finished before you could interact with the IDE again). So I wanted a real Unix, or something close enough to it.

The best option I found was Slackware. Back then, it could install directly into the MS-DOS partition (within the C:\LINUX directory, through the magic of the UMSDOS filesystem), and boot directly from MS-DOS (through the LOADLIN bootloader). That is: like DJGPP, it could be treated like a normal MS-DOS program (with the only caveat being that you had to reboot to get back to MS-DOS). No need to dedicate a partition to it. No need to take over the MBR or bootloader. It even worked when the disk used Ontrack Disk Manager (for those too young to have heard of it, older BIOS didn't understand large disks, so newer HDDs came bundled with software like that to workaround the BIOS limitations; Linux transparently understood the special partition scheme used by Ontrack).

It worked with all the hardware I had, and worked better than MS-DOS; after a while, I noticed I was spending all my time booted into Linux, and only then I dedicated a whole partition to it (and later, the whole disk). Of course, since by then I had already gotten used to Linux, I stayed in the Linux world.

What I've read later (somewhere in a couple of HN comments) was that, beyond not having all these cool tricks (UMSDOS, LOADLIN, support for Ontrack partitions), FreeBSD was also picky with its hardware choices. I'm not sure that the hardware I had would have been fully supported, and even if it were, I'd have to dedicate a whole disk (or, at least, a whole partition) to it, and it would also take over the boot process (in a way which probably would be incompatible with Ontrack).

>>I believe that success Linux has had is because of copyleft, and *BSD are riding on the coat tails of that.

Apparently many here are unaware of the history and story as to what stalled FreeBSD in a long lawsuit involving ATT. You need to read up on that. Copyleft had nothing to do with it.

What would FreeBSD as GPL give you? You could fork it and release FreeGPL with that license tomorrow. (Minus ZFS, but that's in contrib)

Some users of FreeBSD prefer more freedoms than GPL offers. The contributors must not be put off by providing more freedoms.

Places I've worked have contributed changes to FreeBSD and Linux, mostly for the same reason ... regardless of any necessity from distributing code under license, it's nicer to keep your fork close to upstream and sending your changes upstream helps keep things close.

It’s a nice belief for some but wholly divorced from historical facts and circumstances

I feel the same, because it seems that the only desktop-ready OS under GPL today is GNU/Linux, and it feels too bloated nowadays (not to mention that Linux is effectively stuck under GPLv2). Something like FreeBSD feels much lighter and better still being desktop‐ready. Looks like that guys from Hyperbola think the same and that’s why they are doing HyperbolaBSD. Btw there’s some progress in GNU Hurd, but they are still far from being desktop-ready.

I don't understand this thinking. The GPL is more restrictive than the FreeBSD license. You have more freedoms with the FreeBSD license than you do with the GPL(of any version).

> I wish FreeBSD held the position Linux does in the market today. That would be heaven.

Well The BSD's were embattled with a lawsuit from AT&T at the time Linux came around, so it got a late start as it were, even if it's a lot older.

GCC vs LLVM. It isn’t the license.

It'll never happen. You can't distribute ZFS under GPL

freebsd didn't have the hardware support base that linux did and suffered a huge delay in rearchitecture when x86 smp hardware became widely available. (only one cpu could be in the kernel at a time, the "bkl", was a major impediment in the early 00s). freebsd had better resource scheduling at the time and a beloved networking stack, but linux caught up with cgroups etc. i think linux was also just a trendy vanguard of sorts as the world learned of open source software by and of the internet.

Linux is OK. It’s a mess compared to BSD, but it’s OK. It’s the lazy man’s solution. It’s mainly for people who only want to “docker compose up” and walk away. The art of the OS has been lost. People think the OS is something to be abstracted away as much as possible and it’s evil and hard to secure. Shame.

Can you please elaborate the str of Freebsd vs Linux?

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