[eighthnate]

> The GPL license meant that improvements were shared rather than squirreled away in various proprietary spin-offs and thus lost when whatever company was behind them folded (generally, exceptions going both ways surely exist!).

I've always debated this. You would think that BSD licenses would be more attractive to corporations like google, amazon, facebook, etc and GPL licenses were more attractive to researchers and one would have thought that the BSD systems ( freebsd, netbsd, openbsd, etc ) would be the dominant unix-style OSes. Instead the GPL linux based OSes became dominant.

[CyberFonic]

The question is about supercomputers specifically, which are mostly used by researchers and some applications like weather forecasting, aerodynamic simulations, etc. The infrastructures used by Google, Facebook, Amazon are massive clusters of computers, but they are not supercomputers.

In the research space peer-review and reproducible results are critical. So GPL does fit in well. The makers of supercomputers have to accommodate their clients' requirements.