I’m not sure that holds. The major difference between Linux and BSD is the license: Linux is copyleft, BSD is permissive. FreeBSD actually just completed their decades-long goal to remove all GPL code last month, even, and is now proudly socialism-free. You can now embed all of FreeBSD in your commercial product and modify it at will with no obligations to anyone.
I mean, I don’t really hate it, but it’s hard to see BSD as a safe harbor from corporate meddling in Linux. The Linux situation feels like it’s rather the other way around; corpos who extend Linux are legally bound to make their changes public to be accepted or rejected by the broader Linux community, while Apple has no obligation whatsoever to share any MacOS code with any other BSD distribution.
I guess I’m just not the commune-in-the-woods type.
I would argue that the whole philosophy behind FOSS, begining with Richard Stallman and the FSF, derive mostly from aspects of idealist liberalism. It still kinda upholds capitalism in some regard.
Wondering about a clause that prohibits commercial and for-profit use…
Sure, you’re factually correct. But I don’t believe licenses are the issue, just where corporations and governments are focusing their deadly ruin-stuff laser vision. I think you (and most the FOSS community) vastly overestimate how effective the legal protection is. You’re expecting companies to play by the rules THIS TIME. Once ‘big tech’ decides GPL isn’t fair, it won’t matter.
Companies like Microsoft are getting on board with Linux. Even if they can’t get away with ignoring the copyleft license entirely (which I suspect they soon will), they could definitely afford to make a legal clean-room copy of any code they want to make proprietary. Soon that proprietary code will become a necessity to do X, and bam, using any functional Linux will be back in the same boat as using Windows.
I’m not sure that holds. The major difference between Linux and BSD is the license: Linux is copyleft, BSD is permissive. FreeBSD actually just completed their decades-long goal to remove all GPL code last month, even, and is now proudly socialism-free. You can now embed all of FreeBSD in your commercial product and modify it at will with no obligations to anyone.
I mean, I don’t really hate it, but it’s hard to see BSD as a safe harbor from corporate meddling in Linux. The Linux situation feels like it’s rather the other way around; corpos who extend Linux are legally bound to make their changes public to be accepted or rejected by the broader Linux community, while Apple has no obligation whatsoever to share any MacOS code with any other BSD distribution.
I guess I’m just not the commune-in-the-woods type.
I would argue that the whole philosophy behind FOSS, begining with Richard Stallman and the FSF, derive mostly from aspects of idealist liberalism. It still kinda upholds capitalism in some regard.
Wondering about a clause that prohibits commercial and for-profit use…
Sure, you’re factually correct. But I don’t believe licenses are the issue, just where corporations and governments are focusing their deadly ruin-stuff laser vision. I think you (and most the FOSS community) vastly overestimate how effective the legal protection is. You’re expecting companies to play by the rules THIS TIME. Once ‘big tech’ decides GPL isn’t fair, it won’t matter.
Companies like Microsoft are getting on board with Linux. Even if they can’t get away with ignoring the copyleft license entirely (which I suspect they soon will), they could definitely afford to make a legal clean-room copy of any code they want to make proprietary. Soon that proprietary code will become a necessity to do X, and bam, using any functional Linux will be back in the same boat as using Windows.