> 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.
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!)
The existence of some contributions to MIT code does not disprove the assertion.
If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.
What are the equivalent numbers for everything that was ever licenced GPL vs MIT? Neither of us knows but I defy you to even slightly attempt to hint that the world did not benefit from gpl code about a million times more than mit code as a direct result of their fundamental natures.
The assertion I was addressing is that copyfree code "just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions".
My post proved that copyfree code bases actually do receive contributions back from the commercial users of their code. Certainly not 100% of users, but the same is true for the GPL. Every company I've worked for after college has used Linux extensively and none of them have contributed back to Linux in either patches or dollars.
Why do you both keep incorrectly referring to the license as "MIT"? The BSDs are under the various BSD licenses, not the MIT license. If you're trying to refer to the whole category then I would suggest using the words "copyleft" for GPL-style licenses and "copyfree" for BSD-style licenses.
> If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.
It did not prove any such thing except in the meaningless pedantic technicality way. No reasonably rational person read that comment and thought they meant literally 100% not a single example. The existence of exceptions does not disprove anything. Everything has exceptions.
Numbers prove or disprove it. Which neither of us has. The fact that everything you showed even fits in a little comment like that compared to the scope of all software actually proves what a joke it was to even try to present this as any sort of argument.
"why do you keep saying MIT?" Oh FFS really? MIT, or BSD, is perfectly understandable shorthand for any of the mit/bsd/x11/etc in a general discussion like this. They are all of a class. How do you know? Because no one has attempted to discuss any fine points here that would make any of those any different from any of the others. You have to go out of your way to say they are different, and then cannot say in what way that matters or changes anything. So why do you yet again pretend an insignificant detail in any way affects the thrust of the argument?
Go ahead and substitute "MIT" with "BSD" or any of the specific "various BSD licences". Ok now that you did that, what changed? The argument was valid or invalid before, and the opposite now?
So far I'm the only one here who has provided any numbers. All you and soperj have provided are unsubstantiated claims. Why don't you do some analysis on the "scope of all software" and get back to me? Given the scale, I imagine it will take you at least a couple of years.
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.
Linus doesn't agree. He once said in an interview that making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did, [0] and has said that I love GPLv2. I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux because it enforced that you have to give back. [1]
They cannot. Linux success has nothing to do with GPL is in direct contradiction with I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux.
Except you left out an important bit of the OP's statement, where he/she is talking about Linux's success over BSD specifically.
When Linus was talking about the GPL being part of Linux's success, he was talking about Linux's success in general. And yeah, the GPL most likely is a big part of Linux's success.
However, if 386BSD had been freely available in '91, Linux would likely never have had the opportunity to build the developer base needed to take it from a student's neat project to a viable operating system.
> 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.
He's not the only one. And as I said you at least get told his bias. The BBC (see the trump court case) edited time lines and claim to be unbiased. The idea (not mine; "critical discourse analysis" I think) is that all news is biased and the right way to report is to state the bias up front.
I saw an interview where someone asked woz about getting screwed out of a lot of the Atari money It was apparently new information to Woz, and he simply deflated a little, and muttered "not again, Steve..."
>most people who win the lottery aren't rich forever.
Everytime that gets mentions someone points out it's mostly a myth that lottery winners lose it all shortly afterwards. There are a few high profile instances of people winning millions and then wasting it all and then having to go back to work within a couple of years, but it's not the norm.
If the rest of you weren’t so stupid, our industry wouldn’t have a problem
This attitude is why we’re all still stuck writing C++ in 2026. Nobody wants to admit that they’re not hardcore enough to write in poorly designed languages so we never make the effort to improve the situation. We all seem to agree that Zig is an upgrade over C. There’s nothing inherently modern about Zig that we couldn’t have written back in 1995 - we just didn’t because nobody wanted to admit that C is frustrating and clunky, albeit fast.
Yeah, people like to talk about how cultish Rust programmers are, but C programmers are so much worse. Just a couple days ago I had one trying to explain to me that all other languages are worse because you don't understand what the machine is doing under the hood. Completely ignoring it doesn't matter because I have a computer from 2023, not 1986.
> Just a couple days ago I had one trying to explain to me that all other languages are worse because you don't understand what the machine is doing under the hood.
Point out to these people that compilers rewrite your code quite significantly so the choice of language matters a lot less than the choice of debugger, profiler, etc.
True, though it is also true that achieving good responsiveness was not as easy in the past, say 10 or more years ago, without flex box and grid and without calc and clamp and such.
I nowadays use flex, calc, clamp, min, max, scoped variables, and even display table sometimes these days and it just works so well. Eliminates almost all hacks.
what is react responsible for? If you're referring to the explosion of SPAs, I think you should direct your blame to angularjs... React was just a better version of that revolution.
Agreed. React, imo, was a much better Backbone.js. Relatively lightweight primitives, composition, and JSX made building frontend applications fun without having to wire up everything by hand.
It's not necessarily a bonus, different sports need completely different ice properties (e.g. figure skating vs hockey), and a managed arena needs ease of maintenance.
I spend an enormous amount of time at the rink (18 ice times in the last 9 days). Can you explain this? Because I don't see the difference between the ice for figure skating vs hockey, both of which happen daily at our local rink.
Hockey needs colder/tougher ice, for figure skating it ideally needs to be a whole degree C warmer to get better blade penetration. Yes you can balance it and public rinks will keep it constant throughout a day, however for dedicated events it's adjusted (at least it is in our rink).
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.
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