Linux

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[–] mholiv@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Companies are allowed to participate in the community. They are wallowed to use community code. Companies donating servers and resources is actually a good thing. This includes Valve. The “greediness” you talk about isn’t a factor.

Also factually none of those projects you listed were started by IBM. Half of them were started by GNU foundation. The other half were started by Redhat before it was acquired by IBM.

The way Redhat made money was by taking community code and packaging it with support guarantees for other companies. Redhat took that money and hired people to further improve that community code they were packaging. I was at Redhat at the time.

Regarding freeBSD you are forgetting the literal largest user of BSD in the world. Netflix voluntarily gives back code to the community but they aren’t forced to.

Sony is the largest user of FreeBSD in the world. They take the code. Use it improve it and give nothing back. From the PS3 forward all of their devices are based on FreeBSD.

Microsoft also is a large user of FreeBSD in a way. When they couldn’t add a proper networking stack to Windows without everything crashing all the time they’re turned to FreeBSD. Microsoft ripped out the networking code and glued it into Windows 2000. From there we got XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and now 11. All with community code taken and used to fight community coded operating systems.

I guess it all comes down to how you see companies. If you believe that companies will always act in the interest of the community even at the expense of competitiveness I can see how one might see MIT or BSD licenses as adequate.

GPL, LGPL, and MPL on the other hand force companies to give back when they take.

I don’t trust companies enough to use MIT. I choose GPL, LGPL, and MPL.

If a company intended to give back to the community there is no reason why they would not use GPL, LGPL, or MPL. They intend to tie back anyways. Right? MIT just lets them keep their taking but not giving options open.

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[–] somegeek@programming.dev 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

What are you yapping on about? You're making zero sense.

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[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The GNU projects that people actually use are primarily hosted, maintained, and developed by Red Hat (IBM). They are the primary code contributors. Not just GPL, GNU specifically.

This is just a fact.

https://sourceware.org/ (Previously known as sources.redhat.com)

There is more permissively licensed code in most Linux distributions than there is GPL code. Not only is that permissive code not being “stolen” by “mega corps” but the majority of it is corporately funded.

Again, just facts. All pretty easy to verify if facts matter at all to you.

What part did not make sense? Just that the facts do not agree with your opinion?

The comment I responded to was stating things that sounded like facts that are not at all supported by the evidence. And if I ask for some, I am pretty sure the cherry-picked examples will be mostly companies “stealing” projects that they wrote to begin with.

The thesis that permissive licenses result in less Open Source code is wrong. In fact, they lead to greater corporate participation and employees write more code than unsponsored individuals. That is what the evidence shows.

Use whatever licenses you want. Not wanting companies to use code you wrote is a totally valid choice. But you should not have to misrepresent reality to convince other people to do the same.