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by hawski
1868 days ago
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I have some interest in DragonflyBSD and BSD ethic is close to me, but I'll say that Linux being GPL made it successful. It centralizes development and with every developer joining in it cements it even further. But right place and time above all, if it would start today the license would be a nonstarter for many. |
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Centralization doesn't have much to do with the GPL. With a BSD system, you can take an upstream release and use it as the base of your system and not publish your changes. With a GPL system, you can do the same, but if you distribute your system to others, you have to publish your changes; but you don't have to work with the upstream system unless you want to; your changes might get pushed upstream by someone else, or used as inspiration by upstream, but that's not that common. If you wanted to work with upstream, you can do that with BSD as well.
It may be forgotten or not known by many, but there was a 1991 lawsuit from AT&T over code in BSDi and the code in question was in other BSD distributions at the time including FreeBSD until the 2.0 release in November 1994. Certainly Linux had its moment of legal uncertainty that turned out fine, but it came after it was already well established. BSD had a legal shadow at a much earlier time, and that may have driven some people away.