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What new OS* have you tried this year?
(beehaw.org)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Operating Systems
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Considered in and of themselves, permissive licenses are "fine." They confer all four of the freedoms the FSF lists here, so there's nothing wrong with them from the perspective of the person receiving the code as an end-user.
The problem is that, unlike copyleft, they fail to bind that recipient to the same conditions and guarantee those freedoms will be maintained for all downstream users who receive the code in the future. They are thus exploitable by those who would take without giving back in return. This makes permissively-licensed code popular with the exploiters, but is bad for the users in the long run.
See, for example, MacOS and iOS: in theory, they're just BSDs with fancy proprietary UIs, but in practice they can be made so locked-down and user-hostile there's an entire movement devoted to creating new laws to force Apple to stop bricking people's property because they needed to replace a bad hardware component. Those four freedoms I referenced earlier are definitely no longer being upheld by Apple, even though Apple itself benefited from them to make the software in the first place.
There's a reason why copyleft-licensed Linux is so much more popular than permissively-licensed BSD, and resistance to selfish bad actors (even as flawed as it is, what with the "tivoization" exploit of the GPLv2 and all) fragmenting the community with proprietary features is undoubtedly part of it.
There are some opinions mascaraing as fact here and some not very evidence driven at that.
Linux is a beneficiary of great timing. The pre-cursor to FreeBSD, BSD 386, already existed and was much more mature when Linux appeared. The reason that Linux became popular was primarily that AT&T launched a lawsuit against BSD which made its legal status questionable during a critical few years. This was at the dawn of the Internet and the distribution and collaboration that enabled. By the time the lawsuit was resolved, Linux was massively more popular and BSD was left behind. Ironically, early Linux never faced early legal trouble as it was not taken seriously by UNIX players. The Linux lawsuits came later but, by then, Linux had major corporate backers ( see SCO vs IBM with IBM being the on the Linux side ).
Hell, Linus himself has said that he would never even have created Linux is Minix had been free ( meaning explicitly free as in beer, not as in freedom at the time ). In fact, Linus did not want to adopt the GPL at first because it allowed charging for the software.
One reason that Linux was able to advance so quickly ( or exist at all ) was the existence of GNU and especially GCC. I hate the amount of credit GNU tries to take for moderns Linux distros but there is no denying its importance in making Linux viable early on.
Today, Linux succeeds over BSD primarily because of the greater corporate interest. Apple does not really use the BSD kernel either.
These days, the most popular license used in typical Linux installs is MIT and permissively licensed software is more common than GPL. Some MIT communities, like the X Window Project, are decades old and represent strong trends away from corporate dominance and exploration over time. The vibrancy of all the Open Source communities cannot be explained in terms of the world-view expressed in the comment above. I do not have the numbers in front of me to support this but it is my own impression that permissively licensed software generally succeeds more often at creating sustainable communities. Or maybe it is just the FSF. While there are many successful GPL programs, fewer than 500 of them are GNU and there are almost as many abandoned GNU projects as there are active ones.
In my view, the most important GNU program by far is GCC. That evil Apple company you cite created LLVM / Clang and licensed it permissively. They did by far the most work on it and yet have it away. Today, other evil companies like Microsoft contribute to Clang / LLVM as well. LLVM is of course the basis for the Rust language, another corporate contribution. The lack of GPL here does not seem to have prevented any of this innovation, the massive contributions to the community, or collaboration between these giant corporate interests. This is just one example.