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Comment by lvecsey | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the article mentioned it but there was a point well after the Linux kernel reached prominence that it was understood the HURD was just a back burner project. GNU has still had a huge impact on everything from IT data centers to Apple, and arguably you wouldn't even have initiatives like Wikipedia without it either. It's like the building block that allowed everyone else to place a cherry.

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Certainly they had a huge impact, but if GNU had not been around, I wonder if something else would have filled the same niches and subsequently had similar impact?

For instance, the Berkeley people were also working on free stuff around the same time (indeed, the article points out the BSD was a contender for the GNU kernel).

I'm wondering if GNU is to free software what, say, Alexander Graham Bell was to the telephone.

There may have been someone else to do all the work that RMS and GNU did, but the reality is that while everyone else was too busy or too fatalist about the situation in the late 1980s, only RMS et al stood up and took on the responsibility for everyone else.

Also, note that Alexander Graham Bell invented the first practical telephone. RMS is an advocate. Much of his software work is specifically not original: he was trying to emulate UNIX. He and GNU are more of a founding fathers to the US than inventors of a device. Yes, eventually someone else might have declared independence in the western colonies and went to war with Great Britain, but we admit that it was GW and company.

I'm fairly sure the parent's reference to Bell is with respect to details that have recently come to light that Bell may have "stolen" all or most of the technology behind the first phone. That is, Bell's importance has less to do with his ability to create the technology and more to do with packaging and popularizing it.

I was not aware of that. Nonetheless, it seemed to me that the parent post implied that if RMS and GNU didn't come to be, then someone else would have come up and done the same thing, and thus what they did is somewhat less of an achievement. My post was mostly in disagreement with that idea.

It is unlikely that the Berkeley people would've pushed for a completely free (software) kernel without the Stallman influence:

"I think it's highly unlikely that we ever would have gone as strongly as we did without the GNU influence," says Bostic, looking back. "It was clearly something where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea."

Source: http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html

>It is unlikely that the Berkeley people would've pushed for a completely free (software) kernel without the Stallman influence:

<sarcasm>And no one else would of ever gotten to the task of creating a BSD/MIT licensed kernel since everyone would of thought "if Berkeley people didn't do it why should we?".<sarcasm>

Or maybe what seems normal to us know, did not seem so normal in the days? I am to young to have witnessed the UNIX industry in the '80ies.

> Berkeley people were also working on free stuff around the same time

The problem with BSD is that it creates (or at least doesn't remove) an incentive to take whatever you can and run with it that has proven irresistible for companies. Every proprietary Unix has appropriated large portions of BSD and, with few notable exceptions, none gave improvements back - or freely added original work to the common code pool because their competitors could take it and run - take whatever you gave them and compete against you with it.

GPL-like "viral" licenses negate the threat by ensuring any code you contribute cannot be used as a competitive advantage against you.

If it weren't for RMS and the invention of GPL-like licenses, I seriously doubt we would have a healthy open-source ecosystem.

>If it weren't for RMS and the invention of GPL-like licenses, I seriously doubt we would have a healthy open-source ecosystem.

No one can tell what would of happened if this was the case. And expressing your personal opinion doesn't change that.

>The problem with BSD is that it creates (or at least doesn't remove) an incentive to take whatever you can and run with it that has proven irresistible for companies.

And what is wrong with that? Developers know what they're getting into when they license their software under the BSD/MIT licenses. It's better that companies take high quality BSD/MIT licensed code instead of reinventing the wheel by creating their own crappy implementation. I don't even recall any successful high profile proprietary fork of popular BSD/MIT licensed software.

I agree with you on everything else, but there are tons of spectacularly successful forks of BSD-licensed software -- NetApp, Cisco, Juniper, and most of their competitors have proprietary operating systems that are forked from FreeBSD.

Thanks for the info. The only successful software that I could think of was the XNU kernel (Mac OS X) but it is not a fork even though it borrows heavily from FreeBSD for POSIX compatibility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

> No one can tell what would of happened if this was the case

You can look at the market and see if you could form a Red Hat around BSD. Call me back when you get funded.

> Developers know what they're getting into

And that's precisely why stuff like BtrFS is not BSD-licensed. Because the following week, Microsoft would launch their new and improved next-generation NTFS. There may be no successful BSD-branded ("ClosedBSD"? "ArrestedBSD"?) fork (BTW, is JUNOS open? I couldn't download the source) but certainly many pieces of BSD software end up inside proprietary software, and nobody knows exactly how those wheels were modified.

>You can look at the market and see if you could form a Red Hat around BSD.

I don't really see how monetizing from BSD/MIT source code would be different than monetizing from GPL code.

>Call me back when you get funded.

I am sure Apple, Microsoft and Adobe make more money than Red Hat . So again what is your point? Not everything in this life is about money.

>And that's precisely why stuff like BtrFS is not BSD-licensed.

And that's precisely why FreeBSD folk have ZFS and Linux folk don't.

>Because the following week, Microsoft would launch their new and improved next-generation NTFS.

ZFS porting from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD hasn't been easy. What makes you think that porting another modern and complex file system from Linux to Windows would be easy for Microsoft? And anyways it would be awesome that we could get native read/write on Windows partitions from Linux.

>many pieces of BSD software end up inside proprietary software, and nobody knows exactly how those wheels were modified.

>>Developers know what they're getting into

Good, how much have Apple contributed back to FreeBSD? Apple also forked the LGPL licensed KHTML to form WebKit.

Does Apple have a real model that benefits open source/free software compared to the much smaller Red Hat? The only companies that I knew that contributed the same amount to open source/free software as Red Hat were Sun and Google.

But I must be just, Apple has released some open source code (GCD comes to mind) and as far as I'm informed funded some open source software (LLVM for example).

Vertica, Mac OSX.

> It's better that companies take high quality BSD/MIT licensed code instead of reinventing the wheel by creating their own crappy implementation.

This is why all of my friends and I distribute code under a BSD compatible license rather than the GPL. Well said.

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