Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 31, 2014 21:04 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
In reply to: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft by dlang
Parent article: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

I don't think it's as black and white as all that. The BSDs had legal troubles in the early years, which Linux didn't have. Linux also had a different, more centralized "benevolent dictator / lieutenants" model of development, which may have helped it move faster than the BSDs, which were more based around consensus. (At least this is my understanding... correct me if I'm wrong.)

The biggest issue with kernels has always been getting drivers for all the hardware out there. I have to admit that the GPLv2 might have been helpful in giving a few hardware companies a shove in the right direction in this regard. Of course, their true interests lie in getting a good driver for their code upstream, but a lot of big hardware companies (not naming any names here) are shockingly bad at developing drivers, let alone looking towards their long-term software interests. I remember one company that had multiple forks of an enormous, poorly written proprietary driver code base, just to support a single device that came in a few very similar configurations. Over time, the forks drifted apart as bug fixes were applied to one and not the other, or parts were rewritten.

On the other hand, licensing wasn't very effective in getting NVidia to open up to the community. Only Linus giving them the finger could do that :)

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 31, 2014 22:15 UTC (Fri) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]

> Linux also had a different, more centralized "benevolent dictator / lieutenants" model of development, which may have helped it move faster than the BSDs

Then please explain Debian's success, or Samba's success, or Red Hat's success or OpenWrt's success or KDE's success. It is not about the dictator. Other models can work, including consensus or democratic.

> Only Linus giving them the finger could do that :)

He could give them the finger because linux is GPL. Without GPL, the finger would just be rude.

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 31, 2014 23:46 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

nothing I talked about was trying to give any credit for the speed of linux development.

I was just talking about the reasons for people preferring the GPLv2 to BSD and why using the BSDs as an example of they the GPLv2 giveback is actually pointing to something that GPL people use an example of why it's needed and the BSD approach isn't good enough.

There have been a LOT of BSD based appliances over the years, many of them doing amazing things, but there has been extremely little that has come back from those to the community.

Meanwhile, the GPL enforcement (and the threat of it) has caused the manufacturers of many Linux based devices and appliances to provide drivers back to the community.