This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Lol I read Linus' release notes for Linux .01 (linked in the article) and I really liked this part listed under the hardware requirements
Finnish keyboard (oh, you can use a US keyboard, but not without some practise :-)
The Finnish keyboard is hard-wired, and as I don't have a US one I cannot change it without major problems.
The requirement for a Finnish keyboard was literally hard coded into the first version of Linux. Hilarious.
What does this mean? Can someone explain in simple terms?
BSD is a permissive license that allows sometime to take the code and update/change it as they see fit. There are no requirements to publish those changes, and I believe you can license it under a different license.
GPL on the other hand does require that you publish your changes, and that those changes also be licensed under GPL. Thus also requires that a company does due diligence and states what pieces of code they used were GPL and give credit
So in removing the last bit of GPL code, someone can take FreeBSD and do whatever they want without having to worry about what pieces of code might fall under different licenses.
In a sane and healthy software company, they would contribute their changes back to BSD just because it makes easier to apply latest BSD changes amd security fixes.
Most companies wont. They fork, modify the BSD code for their specific hardware, sell it, and never ever update thier software.
Seeing where BSDs are today vs Linux/GNU I would say history made it clear already.
Capitalism will 100% use and give zero every single time when permitted.
Creating a whole unix-like ecosystem without GNU has been the goal since LLVM launched.
In my opinion, I just don't understand permissive licenses. For example, with FreeBSD's license, companies can essentially "steal" the hard-earned efforts and use them to enrich themselves. For example, FreeBSD could have been a gaming OS, as the PlayStation's OS is FreeBSD. However, they didn't give anything back to the community.
Copyleft licenses, on the other hand, require companies to contribute any changes they make to the code back to the community so that it benefits the community as a whole. In this case, there's no "stealing", companies need to respect the community's efforts by giving back.
That's my two cents anyway.
i believe it has the advantage of corporate interests not affecting the projects direction. i think linux is doing ok now (other than way too much redhat stuff) but i'm not sure if this is gonna continue after linus is gone.
To play devil's advocate for a second - no-one is stealing anything, the code is still right where it was. If I willingly give someone a sandwich, did they steal it? Of course not.
There was a reason that PS chose FreeBSD, and it was because of the licence. If FreeBSD used the GPL then PS wouldn't have used it, hence there never would have been a FreeBSD gaming OS either way.
Exactly, it's a defining feature of the project. They don't care how you use the code as long as you use it. It's just a different philosophy.
BSDs are just doing their own thing and whether they benefit or not from others using their work is not really a concern.
Take OpenSSH, it's used by virtually every operating system and just exists to be used. It's a great contribution to software even if OpenBSD is a tiny marginal thing used by only those that need it. They are cool with that.
If freebsd was copyleft PlayStation would've never used it in the first place. Same as the BSD TCP/IP stack with windows.
It's not stealing when you willingly allow someone to use it however they want. OpenBSD writes: "We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to." If your goal is to polish something like OpenSSH until it's as good as it can be, the world is better off when robust and secure software spread, also into proprietary systems. When companies use OpenSSH, it does not take away anything from OpenBSD, they are not competitors.
Both licenses were made before late stage capitalism started in earnest, and when the Net was young, so there's the matter of perspective.
Imho the GPL was born out of ideology, whereas the BSD was out of a murican university environment (i.e. preparing proto-capitalists to enter the market).
The debate is endless.
pushoverOS has finally finished it's transition to free repository for oligarchs.
The upshot of the BSD-license in the case of FreeBSD is that it has found it and its components used in many commercial products, including MacOS/OS X, the PlayStation’s Orbis OS, and of course the BSD networking stack is happily used in Windows, macOS and just about anywhere else. Meanwhile the GPL forced Linksys to open the firmware to its WRT54G series of routers, ultimately leading to the development of OpenWrt and similar projects.
They make it sound like the *WRTs were the worst thing to happen to consumer networking and that corporations not being required to contribute back to projects has made BSD stronger, rather than given companies free labor. I find the *BSDs to be pretty interesting, but let's not pretend that they're benefiting from companies using their work. Very shilly tone to this article.
WRT was the only reason some of those routers were even usable.
Seriously, it's the only reason I bought one. Plus, my WRT-54gl is still supported 20 years later on DD-WRT, not that it's all that useful at 100mbit. I still use it for testing.
I still keep a WRT54Gv3 around with DD-WRT because of devices that require WEP. (cough cough)
It's really nice having it set up as a subnet with a ton of restrictions. Something it would be incapable of stock.
So this sounds like a bad thing then...
Like if having gpl code in free bsd forced all these companies to be more open with their software, and now they can be more closed with it, isn't that bad?
It allows freebsd to be true to the BSD license, and I agree with the author that it makes licensing easier. BSD will always be free and incredibly permissive, and I don't see this changing anything. But a lot of the strides that linux has made is because people need to release their changes.
BSD on the other hand doesn't require giving back, so you get Apple that was the largest company in the world building off of the work of FreeBSD. I certainly don't see FreeBSD being comparable to macOS like Fedora is to RHEL. It's more like Apple took what they wanted and walked away.
Yes, it's bad. Permissive licensing (instead of copyleft) is for cucks.
Yes that's probably bad
WRT54G were the best shit back then. So much choice with firmware, loved the Tomato firmware and its flexible QoS. Good times.
OpenWRT is still the best shit now.
I bought a linksys wrt simply because they had the open firmware. That router was amazing!
yeah I liked that bsd really kept to the unix style but license wise gpl is what I respect.
~~Agreed. I also want to learn more about micro kernels as well, which the BSDs use.~~
I think we have a pretty interesting dynamic viewing the two different licensing schemes. Linux/gnu has been making some huge strides, whereas BSD is kind of just very slowly chugging along in niche areas. It does seem to be pretty damn good at the things it does, though. I honestly feel like the BSD license should be a better license because it gives more freedom, but with the existence of greed and capitalism GPL is required to get profit seekers (greedy bastards) to play nice.
Edit: I was wrong, got it mixed up with gnu Hurd when looking things up in the past
I honestly feel like the BSD license should be a better license because it gives more freedom
It does not. Saying the BSD license gives more freedom because it lets developers choose to close up the code is like saying the Confederacy gave more freedom because it let white people choose to own slaves.
I will add to the agreement. I wish gpl was not needed. I did not realize any bsds used micro kernels though.
Now you've got me questioning myself, never claimed to be an expert...
Edit: yep I'm wrong, a microkernel was developed, but looks like it eventually made it's way to GNU Hurd and not really implemented into the BSDs. I recall coming across when looking into different OSs, I guess I got it mixed up.
I thought Microsoft pulled or rewrote the tcp/ip stack a while ago?
