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Comment by mifydev | Hacker News Reader

I miss the UNIX-y movement so much :(

Yeah. The plucky rebels pretty much won against the evil empire, but the forces of darkness weren't completely beaten. They regrouped and then repurposed the rebels tools against them. The might of venture capital, big tech, SaaS, hyperscalers and AI was too much. The rebels weren't decisively beaten so much as eventually eroded out of any real significance.

It helps that the rebels donated copies of all their equipment to the dark forces.

MIT and other non copy left licenses were a mistake. In the 2000s and 2010s people were so concerned with usage and GitHub stars of their OSS that they just gave everything away to corporations and now don't have the right to complain anymore.

Can you point at projects that got abused that way? I see plenty of things that got written by corps or by conglomerates, many of which landed with Apache. And I see lots of copyleft software that pulls whole systems with it.

What’s something that was released as MIT but, had it been GPL2, would have seeded a community?

Mostly it's not stuff that would've had a community if it was GPL - it's stuff that would've had a community either way, then Amazon took it and made it proprietary and took the community too.

In fairness, it is easier to point out has-beens than never-weres.

Eh, I don't think Openai and Anthropic trained with only MIT licensed copy.

Fair, there is the Uber model of 'When a founder does it, it's not illegal.'

What do you mean? GPL licenses aren't truly free! They limit the right of corporations to abuse users! That can't be right! Better to use another license on the off chance you'll win the VC lottery.

I generally agree with fighting corporate abuse, though IMO, GPLv3's anti-tivoization clause is kind of misguided. It may stop locked-down hardware makers from using your software, but it doesn't stop the hardware from being locked-down in the first place.

We have evidence that any hardware maker that would open up their hardware will do it already (see: reMarkable, Ubiquiti offering SSH root access). If you try to fight that battle by holding software from them, you only lose them as a contributor as they make their own, which is worse for everyone.

If it's all your own work, or all yours except for a trivial amount (this is 99% of projects) you can always change the license later.

Like, what? Solaris/SunOS, DEC Ultrix/Tru64, AIX, HP-UX, Xenix, etc., all with big bad monopolist AT&T's UNIX as their grandpappy. UNIX was corporate to the hilt.

Corporate, sure, but painting DEC, (old) HP, and Sun with the same brush as AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft just because they sold proprietary, but generally well-documented and reliable hardware and software at whatever prices the market would bear seems unfair.

Miss? Linux won the war and there is more open source software than ever before, now with language models here I think the best has yet to come.

It's not dead??

It’s as dead as rock and roll

UNIX is, UNIX-y stuff isn't.

Rock vive no muere

but the heart of GNU is still beating!

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