FreeBSD DRM Is Causing A Load Of In-Fighting This Week

[aht0]

Shame and obligation are cultural concepts that different people see differently. Think outside your own narrow upbringing for once. You keep hammering on concepts whole lot of the world sees completely different from you.

[cybertraveler]

I told you, spend a minute searching the Google. I am not going to just hand you everything on a platter.

Except for a home servers, everything you listed falls already under medium-sized servers. Because it's cheaper and more fail-tolerant to rent server space for small companies using cheap or free offers, rather than spending extra for infrastructure and maintenance. Every cent counts.

Remember; I'm not saying you're wrong. I don't know the true answer. I'm just saying that you made a claim that is going to catch a lot of people off guard (as it did me) and surprise them. I expect most people here believe that the majority of servers run GNU/Linux. If you want to drop the claim that, that isn't true then you're going to have to give stronger evidence.

It's a difficult topic. You can't get precise numbers on how many GNU/Linux servers there are out there because there is no central registry.

[Weasel]

It's obvious "freedom" means different things to different people.

Thing is some people don't even know what a license truly is.

Hint: it's not code.

A license tells you what you are allowed to do and not to do with a particular thing. You are never the owner of that thing. The owner has full control over it and he is not restricted by the license, the license is what he enforces onto others who want to use his thing. He can change the license, violate it, etc as he pleases, because he is the OWNER and license is only terms of what he licenses to others for that thing. He can even give special exceptions to his license for certain people, if he wants.

So you're telling me that a license that tells you that you MUST do X, Y, and Z is more free than one that doesn't? Since that's what the GPL basically does. It puts more restrictions on what you can do with the code (i.e. any modifications distributed must be released).

You guys are fucking missing the point of a license here. GPL is not "free software", it's a god damn license. GPL has the side-effect of creating more free software, which is good. But that's irrelevant. As a license, it's definitely NOT more free than BSD because it has more clauses you need to follow, ffs. This is not subjective. It's a fact.

GPL is not "free software" and it's not "free code". It's a license. Get it already.

[cybertraveler]

Unnecessary use of vulgar language; but legally speaking, Weasel is correct!

[aht0]

It's a difficult topic. You can't get precise numbers on how many GNU/Linux servers there are out there because there is no central registry.

Government structures have that data for themselves. If they are even half-competent. Documenting "what do we have" is one of the jobs of IT-departments. About businesses, in my example it was case of researchers walking from location to location and taking interviews. With large enough data set - like multiple thousand entries with widely distributed parameters, you do get more or less precise picture "what do they have?" as well.

[cybertraveler]

Government structures have that data for themselves. If they are even half-competent. Documenting "what do we have" is one of the jobs of IT-departments. About businesses, in my example it was case of researchers walking from location to location and taking interviews. With large enough data set - like multiple thousand entries with widely distributed parameters, you do get more or less precise picture "what do they have?" as well.

Yeah; in business intranet environments... but all servers on earth, for all uses.

[aht0]

Yeah; in business intranet environments... but all servers on earth, for all uses.

That's nitpicking. Point of statistical analysis -> With big enough sample of data, you'lll get results mirroring reality close enough.

[cybertraveler]

That's nitpicking. Point of statistical analysis -> With big enough sample of data, you'lll get results mirroring reality close enough.

It's not. I can't even imagine how someone would begin to estimate how many GNU/Linux servers there are out there. All the public data centres with racks of systems. All the private data centres. All the companies that have shipping containers crammed full of servers (like Google). This isn't even to mention the cultural and ethnic behavioural differences when it comes to IT. An analysis of America would be incredibly be complex, but even if you came out with some incredibly rough estimate, you could not fairly take that estimate and apply it to another country like India or China and expect the estimates to hold.

What about virtualized operating systems too.

If you know of a study that has attempted to do this mammoth task, feel free to name it or link it.

You can't expect me or others to believe your surprising claim without at least giving some reference.

[Guest]

Democracy is tyranny by majority.

That's why I quoted this word. It has better meaning in propaganda terms, but we all know how it looks in practice. However, I think analogy was quite valid in this case.

Explain to me how does licensing something as BSD take away other software? The code author can put whatever the fuck license he wants, it's his code. He can even change the license at any time if he wants to or make it closed source despite it being GPL originally, as long as he wrote all the code or 3rd party code he used allows it. Licensing terms don't apply to the owner, they're a license for others who take it.

You didn't write it, so you aren't entitled to anything.

It's all about the code, not about authors. It's better for code to be GPL rather than BSD. If code is being used by some proprietary company and they improved it, the original code gets nothing back if it's BSD, so its just being 'raped'. GPL demands them to 'pay' for it.

[Guest]

Bah, Netflix's content delivery network is running on FreeBSD, about year old random article for your digestion. I hope it does not cause diarrhea.
https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/...e-cdb51dda3b99

Are you sure?

https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/4/23/194

that is typical for my employer (Netflix, and our tens of thousands of Linux instances in the AWS/EC2 cloud)

It seems to be a pretty big number, so I wonder where's BSD out there? Aren't those clouds responsible for content delivery?

About big firms "simply taking and never giving back to BSD because of a "bad license".. from same article..

I don't have to support this by any article. It's enough to read a BSD license. It's not just about giving nothing back. It's about giving back some crap as well.

Windows server market share is bigger than Linux's. Latter is mostly used for serving web - thats-why it's so visible. Intranet servers usually run lotsa Windows servers because there's simply no good alternative to MS's enterprise software. Portion not visible from Internet, never appears in any market share graphs. Web servers never have that issue.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/com...nux,os-windows

https://w3techs.com/technologies/ove...ing_system/all (Unix is Linux)
w3techs.

So your implication that GPL somehow is the reason for bigger market share [...]

Yes, indirectly. Linux is better, because of GPL, so it's much more popular in server market.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/det...s-unix/all/all

web.archive.org/web/20150806093859/http://www.w3cook.com/os/summary/