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The Stallman report
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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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But if each corporation forked their own kernel, after a few years of customizing the code to their needs, they would each be developing their own operaging system so all software would only run on company systems and would not be compatible with customer's systems.
No, their derivatives are not running on top of another person's OS, they are themselves the OS. Hardware doesn't make itself compatible with Linux, Linux makes itself compatible with hardware (by using or creating drivers). Those other companies do as well (or own the hardware stack as well, like Cisco).
My argument is if Linux goes AGPL3 which causes each company to fork the last GPL2 release, than after a few years of each company maintaining their own forked version, they will each evolve into their own operating system designed for their corporate software rather than all coporations using a single operating system that each develop their software to run on that OS.
But if they choose to develop on top of BSD then they will never be constricted by meaningless pointless software license.
I am an ISC supremaist for the sake of individual liberty.
This doesn't reflect how that works right now, though, nor how AGPL would affect most corporations.
You listed 2 companies (Cisco and Google) that maintain their own forked Linux versions (IOS and Android). Neither of those OSes are server OSes already. They're router and mobile phone OSes.
The other hundreds of thousands of companies don't even touch the kernel, and would not be affected. It would not change the landscape at all to move it to AGPL.
I can speak on Cisco's system or software, because I have always been suspicious of Cisco due to how massive they are, no company gets like that without dirty dealing underneath.
I don't think Google forks Linux, they use parts of the kernel, and there's also OpenBSD security code in Android as well.
While Google is evil and I will rejoice at the death of Google, I hope they are successful in their new OS to fully replace Android. I think it's called Fusia. Software development is always better then GPL code is stripped out and replaced.