| > Really? And whats with all the proprietary blobs? The Modules (like nvidia), for the end-user it changes absolutely nothing, having bad firmware your wifi will not work, the license is absolutely not important for the end-user. I think the sibling comment covered most of this well, but I just wanted to add that relying on closed-source drivers is far from necessary with many setups of modern day Linux. All of the drivers on my computer, save for the processor microcode, are open source and for the most part, bug free. In fact, they are probably mostly bug free because they have so many eyes on them. > Nearly no one cares that most Androids have stoneage Linux kernels, whats important for them is that the Android-Runtime (aka Play-store) can download and execute "Apps". While many users might not know this is the reason, I think the copyleft license of Linux has let it become where it is currently, as it forces vendors who might otherwise release proprietary blobs addressing issues must instead release the changes with a license such that it can be improved upstream. This pushes companies who spend the energy to fix the bugs in an otherwise good kernel to give those changes back to the community, similar to how the companies took from the community in order to use the kernel. > > potentially improved kernel > Or potentially worsened kernel, which now sits in you closed down IoT device, again the license is NOT important for the normal end-user. Well I think this is a great argument in favor of GPLv3 over GPLv2, which bans this (see [1]). This is another reason why end users could care about the license used in the code. GPLv3 code guarantees the end user the freedom to modify the code and run it on their device (or apply other people's modifications). Though I will concede that this is less of an end-user-centric idea because it requires a decent level of technical competency. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization |