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by coldtea 3671 days ago
>What makes you so sure that, had the GNU stack been BSD/MIT licensed and as popular, that Microsoft etc. would not have come out with products featuring the same software but with proprietary extensions and closed licenses?

Was makes you so sure that it would matter? The original software will still be there and free for any modification one would want to do.
1 comments
sidhu1f 3671 days ago
A majority (if not most) of the contributions to the Linux kernel come from developers paid to do so by the likes of Intel, Google, IBM etc. [1]. Do you have any reason to believe that said for-profit companies would have contributed to the same degree to a BSD/MIT licensed Linux kernel instead of focusing on a Linux kernel with proprietary extensions under a closed license?

[1] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/infographics/who-w...

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stephenr 3671 days ago
Do you have reason to believe that they wouldn't have, or that they would do so, if it were GPL3+ licensed?

Apple famously doesn't provide any "recent" GNU tools because they're GPL3+ licensed, when they were previously GPL2.x and less restrictive.

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tremon 3671 days ago
Do you have reason to believe that they wouldn't have

Maybe, as a data point: how many of the manufacturers' contributions to Linux are MIT licensed, so that they can be picked up by *BSD as well?

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