Linux 3.2 Kernel May Be Of A Worrying Size

[Shining Arcanine]

Someone else will take over.

Seriously, the only reason Linux releases depend on him is that most of the different players involved in the kernel have agreed to it. Google is one that hasn't, and they have their own kernel they release on their own schedule.

If Linus retires, all the various distros and companies will agree on someone else to take over his job, and things will continue on as they always have.

Or, of course, you can choose to believe the opposite - that Linus is the only thing holding all these various groups together, and that Linux will fragment into a thousand different fiefdoms after he's gone just like BSD. But that doesn't make much sense to me.

A thousand? Do you have a list?

By the way, Linux only has an illusion of no fragmentation. At the moment, the major fragments are Android, uClinux, Linux DNA, Zen Linux, Usermode Linux, the Xen patches, the grsecurity patches, and Linux Next. If Linus dies, these could all go separate ways rather quickly.

[Shining Arcanine]

Right. You use a GPL library (which nobody forces you to do), and that saves you the time needed to write equivalent code. The price is your own code.

The coder-centric view.

Example:

You use the Linux kernel, put it on a phone and sell that. Your kernel source is available, so if there's enough interest, people can continue developing a system for your hardware when your commercial interest has waned.

You use a BSD kernel, do stuff with it, call it Mac OS and sell it. The user has to pay lots of money to use it, and if you decide not to support your old PPC hardware platforms anymore, though luck.

Similar for programs, if a developer is allowed to close and sell the code, it's the user's loss (long term, short term the vendor might add some value). And the world contains much more users than developers, so overall, free code benefits much less people than free applications.

That is an overly simplified model of how things work. BSDi died and much of its code was contributed to FreeBSD. Apple contributes LLVM/Clang, GCD and CUPS back to BSD, among other miscellaneous things.

Using the BSD license does not imply that people never share. Using the GPL license does not imply that people will share. If people make some awesome changes to GPL code and keep them all inside their organization (or all inside their cloud), they are under no obligation to share.

[mrugiero]

You have that completely backwards. Since it is the person who develops the code that decides the license it's more "Feel free to use my code however you want no matter who you are." which is hardly egotistical.

Yes, it's selfish if you see the programmer side, but if you see the project itself, you will see two things:
First, more people/companies will share (and want to share) the code they put inside the project, because they know noone will get the economical benefit they drop to get by giving away that code.
EDIT: I want to clarify a little this statement, as I re-readed it and sounds ambiguous to me. What I mean about the companies is when there are several competitors coding for it. With a GPL license, they just share the code because they know they're paying that development for both, and they know any code the other companies add can benefit them too. With a BSD license, they will probably be less prone about giving the source to the free version, because they have no guarantees of getting any of the competitors added improvements.
Second, the project will not be just a way for the companies to get cheap code and then releasing closed source apps, which means users pay for something the author intended to give for free.

So, users and project itself point of view, it's sort of altruist, not selfish.

[mrugiero]

That is an overly simplified model of how things work. BSDi died and much of its code was contributed to FreeBSD. Apple contributes LLVM/Clang, GCD and CUPS back to BSD, among other miscellaneous things.

Using the BSD license does not imply that people never share. Using the GPL license does not imply that people will share. If people make some awesome changes to GPL code and keep them all inside their organization (or all inside their cloud), they are under no obligation to share.

You're right. But I thought we were discussing the cases where one distributes in some way the programs (being commercially or freely) and what the licenses promotes.

[kebabbert]

Ok, now I get it. Yes, it makes sense, what you say. I have not thought about it from that point of view. Good lesson. Thanks.

But still, GPL is more restricted code wise, than BSD license. With GPL you MUST release your code. With BSD, you can choose. Hence, the forum post earlier, mixed the licenses up: GPL is more restricted than BSD.

[XorEaxEax]

GPL-style licenses create an environment which provides what you might call "protection for a volunteer project", ie a place where developers can feel relatively comfortable contributing to a project knowing that their work is not likely to be forked away into someone's proprietary effort and have more resources poured into the proprietary fork than the public fork.

BSD-style licenses were created to support standards and reference implementations, and as such allow the code to be pulled into proprietary projects because that greatly increases the chance of the code and functionality becoming and continuing to be a standard. It doesn't provide as much of a warm fuzzy feeling for volunteer developers, but in most cases BSD-style licenses are used in places where there are other reasons for proprietary developers to contribute back to the public code base, so from a practical POV you end up with similar results.

Yes this is quite in line with my own thoughts on the matter, in a larger perspective I think the BSD licence appeals more to code such as languages, libraries, frameworks while GPL appeals more to actual applications.

[kraftman]

Ok, now I get it. Yes, it makes sense, what you say. I have not thought about it from that point of view. Good lesson. Thanks.

But still, GPL is more restricted code wise, than BSD license. With GPL you MUST release your code. With BSD, you can choose. Hence, the forum post earlier, mixed the licenses up: GPL is more restricted than BSD.

Wow, you learnt something new. The GPL restrictions are brilliant for community.

[mrugiero]

Ok, now I get it. Yes, it makes sense, what you say. I have not thought about it from that point of view. Good lesson. Thanks.

But still, GPL is more restricted code wise, than BSD license. With GPL you MUST release your code. With BSD, you can choose. Hence, the forum post earlier, mixed the licenses up: GPL is more restricted than BSD.

Indeed, as for the code, GPL is more restrictive than BSD.

[Shining Arcanine]

Wow, you learnt something new. The GPL restrictions are brilliant for community.

You say that, but the OpenBSD community cannot use any code licensed under the GPLv3. The same goes for the other *BSDs. Projects under the GPL is free to take as much as code from the BSD community as their developers want, but the GPL basically ensures that improvements rarely are sent back.

The GPL has become what it claimed to prevent as far as the things that predate it in this area are concerned. :/

[kraftman]

You say that, but the OpenBSD community cannot use any code licensed under the GPLv3. The same goes for the other *BSDs. Projects under the GPL is free to take as much as code from the BSD community as their developers want, but the GPL basically ensures that improvements rarely are sent back.

That's one of it's brilliant things. Bsd's are Linux competitors, so I see no reason to support competition. If they want Linux code they should become GPL. If they are angry, because they can't get Linux code back they just use shitty license.