[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[ron minnich]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 9:09 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:



​FWIW:  I disagree​.  For details look at my discussion of  rewriting Linux
in RUST
<https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-possible-advantageous-to-rewrite-the-Linux-kernel-in-Rust-when-the-language-is-stable>
on quora.   But a quick point is this .... Linux original took off (and was
successful) not because of GPL, but in spite of it and later the GPL would
help it.



Not disagreeing with you all, but: I guess it depends on where you were. In
1994-6 I worked with a friend at IBM Watson on getting netbsd going on
powerpc. Linux killed that effort. It turned out that the BSD license would
allow different parts of IBM to hold back code from other parts of IBM and
still ship product. The GPL made such behavior much, much harder. The
engineers inside IBM preferred sharing code, and the GPL made that
possible. At least that's how it was explained to me.

This also proved true for some Agencies in the US Gov't as early as 1993.
See this:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/LICENSE.SRC. I
was there for the internal discussion which began in 1992.

Weirdly enough, though, sometimes lawyers prefer the GPL. On our third
foray into getting a sane license for Plan 9 in 2013, it turned out Lucent
legal preferred GPL to BSD. Go figure. I don't understand lawyers most
times.
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