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Comment by soperj

7 hours ago

> 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.

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soperj

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craftkiller  7 hours ago

> 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!)

  • kevinrineer  5 hours ago

    So interesting to see Darpa represented in different labs. I wouldn't have bother to look for that interesting tidbit otherwise, so thanks for that.

  • Brian_K_White  2 hours ago

    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.

    • craftkiller  2 hours ago

      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.

      I would like to direct you to the HN guidelines since this is a clear violation of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

      2 replies →

tehologist  7 hours ago

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.