Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sidhu1f 3666 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...
1 comments
stephenr 3666 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.

link
tremon 3666 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?

link