LeFantome

Is it April 1 already?

You are wrong. I doubt I will change your mind.

1. There are many, many, many more companies using Linux without giving back than there are for BSD. And not just “using it” either. Practically the entire embedded universe is one giant GPL violation.

2. Linux is not “true” GPL anyway, so it is a poor example for how the GPL impacts success.

3. The companies that build businesses on FreeBSD tend to give back. There are many examples, the biggest being Netflix.

4. The classic example of a company not giving back is Sony and even that is wrong.

5. People choosing a BSD license value different things, rendering your entire premise meaningless for them and your framing of “the problem” inappropriate.

I do not want to get too deep into Sony. But let’s acknowledge that they first tried to ship Linux on PlayStation. They had to stop. Why? Well, it was not because people tried to copy the operating system. It was because people used it to circumvent other protections to copy proprietary games. The problem was not with Sony’s ethics but with those of “the community” and the lack of respect “the community” had for the concept of copyright.

So, Sony switched to a FreeBSD base and they no longer share that code. True.

However, Sony does contribute to BSD. And Sony is a significant contributor to Clang/LLVM and they do share their work freely (even though the license does not require them to). The FreeBSD project benefits from this as Clang is the system compiler. I benefit from this as my Linux distro also uses Clang as the system compiler.

The BSD license is “free software” and provides all “4 freedoms” touted by the FSF. It protects your rights with regards to the code you have and are using. It does not give you guaranteed access to FUTURE code that you do not write. Those future contributors are free to choose their license. You know…freedom.

BSD lags in features, particularly hardware support, because it has fewer users and therefore fewer developers. That is mostly an accident of history and not, in my view, due in any way to the license. Look up the BSD lawsuit that was happening when Linux appeared. If your argument for the popularity of Linux is the GPL, why did Xorg become the dominant window system instead of something GPL based? Why did Rust, Swift, and Zig appear on LLVM instead of GCC?

Anyway, I could write 100 paragraphs and not change your mind. You certainly have not changed mine.

Yes, the big feature seems to be their package manager. But just because an update succeeds does not mean it did not break anything.

They also have their own boot manager and they seem to be fans of Rust, which explains the COSMIC desktop option. They have their own build system.

It is not clear to me that they are doing anything novel beyond that.

They do not have centralized configuration as far as I am aware so they do not go as far as Nix. As a Chimera Linux user, the atomic updates and bespoke build system feel like things I already have.

Overall it sounds like a nice project. But the improvements seem more incremental than revolutionary.

The ethics of the MIT era referenced in the article are encoded in the MIT license. The ideals are those of Open Source: that software is best developed collaboratively.

RMS believe cares less about developers and more about users. The 4 freedoms talk about the ability to inspect and improve the source code but permissive licenses allow that as well. What makes the GPL unique are the rights it gives to users that are not writing the code. The GPL guarantees that users will get all the code developers write in the future, even if they have not contributed any themselves.

How is it unenforceable?

Real question

If you are a registered entity (even non-profit), you can be fined millions of dollars.

It is a very dumb law.

They need to do what Midnight BSD did, exclude California residents from the license.

If Canada was a state, the Republicans would never win the electoral college again. There would never be another Republican president.

And the House of Representatives would be permanently blue.

And even just 2 more senators would be a massive risk for the Republicans too. If each province was a state, it would be game over in the senate as well.

California, Texas, New York, and Canada would all be blue in 2028. There are only so many Floridas and Texas is not guaranteed.

And if the Canadians in Florida and Arizona and Nevada could vote, they may not be as red anymore either.

Canada will never be a state. But it would certainly kill the US Republican Party if it did.

Agreed. The need for Flatpak goes way down in a distro with access to the AUR.

I use Flatpak for pgAdmin because the Arch packages are terrible. But it is the only one.

He is doing the same kind of rewrite that the Ladybird founder did recently. They are just reacting differently to how well it is going.

Monoculture is bad for everything.

For one thing, it protects you when your BDFL loses their mind completely.

It IS the early days of GNOME. MATE started with the source code of the last GNOME 2 release.