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Comment by jephir | Hacker News Reader

> without copyleft we might not have the fertile collaboration of projects such as Linux, git

Why would this be the case? FreeBSD and SVN were developed without copyleft. GPL is not necessary to get people to contribute to open source.

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Apple seems like a good example of where someone made a proprietary fork of a non-left license, and made only trivial contributions back.

NeXT's usage of BSD predates BSD being available under any open source license, and as such macOS/iOS's use of it seems like a direct consequence of that rather than it being under a non-left license.

I don't understand why the license at the time is relevant. The point is that if it had been copyleft, they would be required to contribute back.

It wasn't, so they weren't and didn't.

I was under the impression that FreeBSD for years depended on GNU GCC for compilation?

In which case I think it's somewhat (if not completely) misleading to say that "FreeBSD ... [was] developed without copyleft.".

http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwMjI

This wasn't a particularly good counterexample, since Linux is more advanced and successful than FreeBSD, and same can by said about git.

By which metric is Linux more advanced than FreeBSD? Companies like Netflix use FreeBSD because its networking stack blows Linux out of the water. Further, how about Xorg, Apache, BIND, Nginx, etc? Significant amounts of userland tools and applications are written under more liberal licenses.

FreeBSD had "containers" aka Jails, more than a decade before Linux. Linux is merely more popular than FreeBSD, and that popularity has zero influence on its quality, I'd argue it might even have a negative impact on its quality in a statistical sense, when you take into consideration all the badly maintained SoC implementations of Linux.

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