this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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GitHub has been around for nearly 2 decades and was largely considered a mostly good thing until maybe the past couple of years. Also important to add that Microsoft seems to mostly have left it alone for the first couple of years (possibly with the exception of Atom, which it left very alone)
In addition to people just generally being slow to change, changing can take quite a bit of effort for some projects for varying reasons. Many of those same projects struggle to keep up with the maintenance workload, so they're not going to jump at the chance to add more work to their plates.
Finally, some people just don't care. For instance, the MIT license being popular is pretty hard evidence that FOSS doesn't necessarily mean anti-corporate, and for many users GitHub still more or less does what it says on the tin.
Though I will say if the service disruptions and ad-injection bullshit continue you'll only see GitHub competitors grow. GitLab seems to be going after their enterprise customers with some success.
Atom is back to life, kinda, there's a fork of it called Pulsar that's actually really pretty good
I'm pretty sure that MIT license is that popular out of ignorance, instead of an informed decision to allow corporate to steal and make money out of their code.
I've known people IRL who talk about the GPL like it's a virus infecting your code
Respectfully disagree. I can only speculate why other developers choose MIT. But for small and medium-sized projects, a more restrictive license is unlikely to protect them from this scenario anyway. And if that's true, one could argue it's better to go down a road where corporate sponsorships are potentially more likely.
Personally, I often choose MIT because I don't care who uses my code and for what, and I'd prefer that it be easy to borrow from. I used to be concerned about how my code was used, but over the years I've developed a strong dislike for copyright as a concept in general so I fight it how I can. Some of my projects are so simple that even MIT seems like overkill. In those cases I use the Unlicense.
I'd like to think that is so but some here will argue non-copyleft licenses are "more free". Ime they don't reply after I point out that's the freedom to deny others freedom.