Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize?

Re:Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize? by holdenk on Friday November 20, 2009 @01:40PM (#952984)

The thing is there are a lot of GPL-like licenses. Linux might have ended up under a BSD-style license rather than a GPL license. While things certainly would have been different, I'm not convinced they would have been worse.

The assertion that there would be no open source movement without RMS is a bit difficult to believe, unless we are going for a very narrow definition of open source.

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Re:Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize? by prodigal_erik on Friday November 20, 2009 @02:02PM (#953054)

Linux under BSDL? We already know how that would end. We'd lose half a generation's best work because it's trapped in the wreckage of vendors' failed proprietary forks.

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

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Re:Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize? by antonovka on Friday November 20, 2009 @03:44PM (#953365)

Your argument makes the unfounded assumption that those vendors would have done the work you "lost" if the code had been GPL licensed.

As a counterpoint, FreeBSD has progressed at a steady clip -- I fail to see how it is significantly behind Linux, and is significantly ahead in many areas.

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Re:Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize? by Aegean on Saturday November 21, 2009 @04:41AM (#954381)

It falls behind by not being as popular. I think this is not a result of BSD being inferior, it's just how things came into being. I don't have numbers on BSD developers or the rate of improvement, but I guess one reason for it is that BSD license put off more developers compared to GPLv2.

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Re:Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize? by antonovka on Saturday November 21, 2009 @03:39PM (#954905)

... I guess one reason for it is that BSD license put off more developers compared to GPLv2.

No, it was just timing. The AT&T lawsuit cast a palor on the BSDs just when Linux started hitting its stride. By the time the lawsuit was settled, Linux had dominant mindshare.

Same reason why MySQL is popular -- PHP gave it the mindshare. Same reason why PHP is popular -- it was one of the few options available at the time, and by the time better things came along, it was already firmly rooted.

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Re:Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize? by ilkhd2 on Saturday November 21, 2009 @01:02PM (#954724)

So do you think that success of MacOS X (derived from FreeBSD)does not show benefitsof BSD model? Or Microsoft's use of NetBSD? And also, many developers put off by GPL( I am for example),

The objective reasons for being not as popular I think, that FreeBSD never positioned itself as a desktop system, and many small things (such as how fast it boots) are neglected. Yet, overall simplicity and order is attractive to me; a lo easier to understand internals IMHO.

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Re:Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize? by prodigal_erik on Saturday November 21, 2009 @05:48PM (#955048)

What's the benefit? The users are still running proprietary software, and the vendor is still confined to the same 10% or so of the computer market.

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Re:Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize? by omouse on Saturday November 21, 2009 @02:29PM (#954827)

It shows almost no success because the code that makes MacOS X and Windows what they are is still proprietary. Having a UNIX shell in MacOS X might be nice, but that's only one part of the system.

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Re:Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize? by prodigal_erik on Saturday November 21, 2009 @05:31PM (#955035)

I do assume that. Linux rapidly caught up with the BSDs despite their huge head start, which demonstrates the industry does have a critical mass of developers who are willing to contribute their work rather than go through the pain of tivoization or building from scratch.

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Re:Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize? by holdenk on Sunday December 20, 2009 @05:17PM (#1006685)

So, its my understanding, that this wasn't do the GPL versus the BSD license, but had more to do with the uncertainty hanging over the BSD distributions due to a lawsuit threat from proprietary Unix.

Now of course I could be wrong, but I think there may be other factors which could explain the difference.

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