Originally posted by calc
View Post
That's what I've been saying all along - GPL got Linux to where it is, which in the PC market space and end users context is exactly nowhere. The GPL was exclusively good for the enterprise, it didn't benefit society whatsoever, just large corporations that make money on it. How come Linux is so good at meeting the sophisticated needs of the enterprise, yet completely fails to meet the basic needs of the end user? My guess is for the same reason a hammer is good at smashing but not that good for performing brain surgery - it simply wasn't designed for that.
And after a cursory research, it would seem that BSD's mass adoption indeed failed exactly for the first reason I presumed - legal issues. By the time those were worked around, the race was over. Not due to the GPL being a blessing, but due to AT&T being a curse
Surely, if the FSF cared about society as they pompously claim, I'd expect to see something better than 99.9% of society currently being stuck with some proprietary platform instead, in some cases, ironically built on top of FSF endorsed products, and that includes Android too, because that's essentially google's services on top of a Linux kernel, and those are very much closed and proprietary. An Android end user is not a Linux user, regardless of how much Torvalds would want you to believe that. That's end user popularity success for proprietary corporate Google, not for FOS Linux or GPL...
You seem a bit too naive to attribute both the tremendous failure of end users and the tremendous benefit of the enterprise to unfortunate development. The FSF simply went for the money, with a competing, superficially decorated business model that worked rather well as free advertisement. It succeeded because it offered a corporate business model that excluded paying royalties to MS, therefore cutting operational costs and increasing profits.
Nothing in the fundamental design of the FSF or GPL indicates any of the claimed concern for society, there are no safeguards whatsoever against the situation developing into what it is today, on the contrary, the design is in stark contrast to the claimed intent, it worked out exactly as it was designed to.
Either the FSF was truthful and honest about their agenda and tremendously failed at it, or it was never their actual intent but a mere publicity stunt. There is no third option. And the evidence largely points at the latter. At any rate, either way is bad.
Lastly, I do not deny, nor do I have any problem whatsoever with Linux being successful and useful to the enterprise market. If it wasn't for Linux, it would have been something else, it was the right place and time to meet significant enterprise demand, and that's all there is to it. My problem is with the FSF not being open and honest about it. Linux is hands down the more open and technologically superior OS, so what I lament is none of that reached to benefit society directly, because regardless of how good it is as a hardware operating system, it is still as lousy as it has ever been as an end user operating system, which could not possibly be due to accidental misfortune development, not in the face of so much dev hours being spent on countless distros, started with the intent to make a user friendly Linux, so much failure can only be due to design limitations. At the same time, Google a - a big corporation basically manages to succeed at making a user friendly OS on top of it on the first try, which could only mean one of two things - either GPL is tailored to primarily benefit big corporations or we must assume that end user adoption is impossible without the proprietary component, and the latter just doesn't make any logical sense. Claimed to be designed to benefit society and protect it from MS's monopoly, ended up doing the exact full opposite, and in fact, as already mentioned, even mean old MS now sits on its board as a premium member, and reaps more benefits from FOS than society ever has, and likely ever will. Whether you attribute that to design intent, or unfortunate accidental development, or a monumental failure to accomplish the claimed goals, or continue to deny the reality of the matter is up to you. Note tho, that acknowledging problems is the first and foremost step to solving them, impossible to do so without making it.
Comment