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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

The Linux kernel's license is copyleft, which has done all of zip, zilch, nada, zero, to prevent large corporations from benefitting from the enormous amount of free labor put into open source.

Git is GPL, this didn't prevent GitHub from becoming a multibillion dollar behemoth of a Microsoft subsidiary.

The value which companies capture is in using software, not modifying it and selling a proprietary version of the modified code. The only way to sustain this misapprehension is to notice every time permissively licensed software makes a company some money, and studiously ignore it every time copylefted software does the same thing.

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> The Linux kernel's license is copyleft, which has done all of zip, zilch, nada, zero, to prevent large corporations from benefitting

You have it backwards. The goal of copyleft is not to "prevent others from benefiting". The goal is to potentially benefit from the adoption. If someone uses your copyleft library and fixes bugs in it, you can see their fixes and bring them back upstream. So you benefit from their work.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with a company using liberally licensed OSS to make money. It's not a zero sum game. The contribution from these companies could be considered to be the benefit to the end user for creating the final product (that includes the OSS), and at a lower price than it would've been had they had to make the equivalent OSS privately themselves.

There cannot be an OSS license where the user of the OSS who don't make money don't need to pay, but a corp that do make money pays.

kernel (and linus) lost a decade long war against this.

and nobody cared. read about the "tainted kernel" compromise. without it android, modems, anything with a linux firmware, would be truly open source.

alas, the modem manufacturers won then.

Aaah the time of WinModems. "Get a real modem" .

I remember.

This is plain false. Companies contribute massively to the Linux kernel.

GPL worked very well for it even if, unfortunately, it's not GPL-3

Yeah companies notoriously have to contribute back to the Linux kernel all the time, it is a massive success story for copyleft.

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