Minoca Is A New GPLv3, General Purpose OS

[andrebrait]

So for starters AOSP is primarily BSD licensed. Second even if we were to falsely propose that the GPL is why Cynaogenmod exists (It doesn't, it exists because AOSP is BSD Licensed, only the kernel and some userspace bits here and there are under other licenses), the part where AOSP is GPL doesn't seem to be working because the main thing preventing you from installing a random ROM onto your phone... is drivers... So something that should be falling under the scope of the GPL v2 given that ARM vendors don't have the excuse Nvidia has,, instead the response of ARM vendors has been to create license shims in order to keep their drivers proprietary. The result is I just can't take any random Android ROM and put it on any random phone. You can argue "Muh stable hardware ABI", but if things acted as proposed instead of how they actually work wouldn't those drivers be open and thus it not matter?

This is because Linux is no Stallman either. He allows proprietary drivers to load into the kernel. He just doesn't care. It's part of why Linux worked and part of its issues as well. And pardon my ignorance. You're right.

Second, the success or failure of any open source software project is more a matter of historical facts than licensing, Consider the LAMP stack for a moment, 2 of the 4 are Free Software, the other 2 are under permissive opensource licenses. The Apache Webserver is obviously licensed under the Apache License (ngnix, Apache's only serious competitor is under 2-Clause BSD), PHP is under a license that broadly resembles the original BSD license. X11 and Mesa are under MIT. While KDE is under GPL, Qt used to be proprietary and was then put under a custom open source license that the FSF considered incompatible, before finally shifting over to being LGPL.

Third as to companies contributing back to FreeBSD, FreeBSD gets back plenty of corporate contributions, particularly from Netflix, however the reason that Linux gets substantially more contributions back is that Linux is wildly more popular than FreeBSD is. Less users means less contributors.

I know that. You're right, again. However, I still see more restrictive licenses as more "open" in the sense that they sorta say "hey dude, you got this for free, you can use it but on one condition: offer to others for free as well" instead of "hey, do whatever you want with my tons of hours of hard work. feel free to never give back or not give this to anyone because I don't care".

I see the point of both in the freedom sense. And I have read several discussions on these matters. Like the Redox folks who say they don't mind the MIT being a permissive license because anyone who would grab Redox and enhance it would be putting their efforts in it and spending time and money doing this. And I see their point. Like you said, many of these projects are under permissive licenses and they are doing fine. I'm more of a "hey, dude, you got this for free, don't go being an arse to everyone else by not sharing!" kind of person, so I use GPL for my software.

Except it didn't, nor did Stallman and Free Software start open source development as a thing, they simply became a subset that was there, and managed to get some of their software to be first and working well enough to not have an immediate need to be replaced and thus won in the historical context, and that it wasn't until recently that they have tried to replace them (LLVM for example). If GNU hadn't been around Berkley would have come up with their own full stack that everyone would be using instead. The original BSD patchset was a pascal compiler, do you really think that a C compiler and associated frameworks would have been beyond their grasp?

Hey, I said free software did, not stuff approved by the FSF as free software only. Ok, we've gone far enough from the main topic here. Overall conclusion: you're historically right, but I think things are too complicated... This licensing stuff is a huge topic.

I enjoyed the lesson very much, however. Thanks for the info, as I did not know quite a bit of it.

Sigh, LLVM? Wasn't direct back-contribution to FreeBSD but it certainly helped FreeBSD a lot..


About main topic. Gonna be interesting..

It sure did. Guess I was wrong this time.

[Holograph]

It's probably not written in Rust... I don't blame the guy, Rust wasn't even around in any usable form a few years ago, but damn I'd like to see something more conventional written in Rust pop up somewhere. I don't think Redox is viable because of licensing. I'll just keep waiting...

Won't be taken seriously if it's written in Rust... It may not end up being taken seriously either way, but definitely not if it were written in Rust.