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soperj • today at 4:36 PM • 5 replies • view on HN

> Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.

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.

Replies

craftkiller • today at 4:57 PM

> no contributions

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:

  15925 The FreeBSD Foundation
   3738 Netflix
   2084 EMC / Isilon Storage Division
   1922 Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate")
   1733 Dell EMC Isilon
   1550 Chelsio Communications
   1446 DARPA, AFRL
   1421 Mellanox Technologies
   1262 Klara, Inc.
    784 Arm Ltd
    729 iXsystems, Inc.
    707 Solarflare Communications, Inc.
    552 Netflix, Inc.
    477 Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG
    473 Microsoft
    421 Juniper Networks, Inc.
    411 DARPA, NAI Labs
    386 Stormshield
    385 Microsoft OSTC
    384 DARPA
    375 NetApp, Inc.
    358 Innovate UK
    355 DARPA, Network Associates Laboratories
    317 Yandex LLC
    299 NVIDIA Networking
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!)
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tehologist • today at 5:26 PM

Linux success has nothing to do with GPL and everything to do with a lawsuit and timing. Linus himself said if it wasn't for the lawsuit Linux probably would not exist.

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bch • today at 7:23 PM

> The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL.

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.....

iamnothere • today at 5:40 PM

BSD was tied up in lawsuits for years, giving Linux a head start.

tehologist • today at 5:27 PM

Also why did you mention MIT licensed, it is obviously BSD licensed.