Richard Stallman Calls LLVM A "Terrible Setback"

[jsdyson]

BSD receives less contributions than linux for mostly the same reason than hurd (which is not permissive): it's because linux exists and took of.

I have to admit that Linux partially took off because of a few reasons -- personality cult (to an extent), and also idealism about GPL. The idealism might be related to the probably incorrect idea that GPL forces submissions back to the codebase (which it doesn't.)

SO, GPL might have been a big part of the growth of Linux. Until approx. the early 2000's, FreeBSD actually worked better on the proper hardware. Once the Linux crew mostly fixed some of their subsystems, then it started working better (the terrible clogging or going to sleep that early kernels would do.) One key to the FreeBSD working consistently (early on) was VERY CAREFUL management of the creation/queuing of for dirty page/dirty data writes. (I know, I wrote the code!!!) Long queues and big deferred writes create huge latencies (clogging.)

John Dyson

[jsdyson]

Yes, but in practice, it's contributing back. Why? Because you not only have to give the source to the people you give binaries to, but give them the right to redistribute it, that's how the GPL works, and AFAIK that's how all of copyleft works.. This means it will eventually go public, as someone will end up sharing it. In turn, this leads to the project having the opportunity to merge those changes upstream. Of course, it's up to them, but the same can be said when someone directly tries to contribute: accepting the contribution is up to upstream.

(Sorry if a similar reply is already seen)
If you are a business and purchase 'GPL support' with updated binaries/source, you have NO business motivation to pass the code on to anyone else. If you are a GPL idealist, then you might want to pass the code on. However, both kinds of licenses encourage contribution back to the 'pool' by the advantages of net support. (That is intrinsic support by the net community.)

The biggest difference between the various licensing schemes are idealism versus practicality (you choose which is idealism and which is practicality.)

John Dyson