this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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GNU is older than Linux? Neat.
Yeah… but it was just RMS yelling at people from a street corner, nobody actually used it until Linux came along ;-)
I'm pretty sure Apple and Google already rewritten all important GNU parts into something with Apache or BSD license, to throw everything GPL licensed out of their embedded systems. The biggest and most important part was obviously GCC, replaced by Clang.
How many GPL-licensed system libraries and tools are in Android right now, except for the kernel? I'm pretty sure the answer is zero.
Clang and the LLVM with BSD like licences so we can get the 80's suing experience of UNIX yet again.
It's impressive how many people in the FOSS community hate GNU. Even to the point of creating OSes without GNU in it. Working for free for companies just to get their contributions stolen or expunged.
Apple loves Open Source, they can stole it as they like, like they did with Darwin (a derivation of XNU). Everything is open until we no longer want to, and you don't have any right to desist such actions. This sounds like a dream for them.
Google loves Open Source, they can build an spyware, ad vending machine, DRM platform that is hosted in almost any IOT machine. This is Android.
The community has to realize that if you care about your software you have to ENFORCE the freedom of it.
The are entire projects just to liberate android from google. That's is all fault of the open source licence.
There are quite a lot of projects which exist to liberate software projects that have been taken hostage. This is no sense.
Most of the IOT devices are presenting paywall features thanks to Android: cars, fridges, TVs, etc. What is next?
XNU is the kernel in Darwin, XNU is an Apple product derived from BSD and Mach. Darwin has a lot of FreeBSD in it.
Apple shares that code though. It’s on GitHub. There used to be Darwin distributions.
Your Android example doesn’t make very much sense either. The largest Android issues are typically hardware lockdown. Nothing about the GPL prevents someone building an ad platform that spies on you, it just makes them share the source code for it. Google’s licensing choices means they don’t share the source code for the Google pieces they put on top of AOSP, the entire project means people can build the alternatives though.
The lawsuits were about AT&Ts proprietary license. BSD and similar licenses are not that.
BSD licence allowed to work with the AT&T licence which at the end generated all the drama. Unix wars.
Again BSD is great if you don't care about what will happen with your code.
Yeah the Android point doesn't have any sense, that's right.
Apple shares the code of the parts they want. Since it's not a copyleft licence, then they can still ship you a version of Darwin + privative code as your macOs without sharing the entire code. So you end running kind of Frankenstein program with parts you don't know what they do.
AOSP is not a great licence because it allows Google benefit from contributions, but then it has tons of privative software on top. So basically contributing to the AOSP means that you improve the code that later it's used in combination with privative one.
My point is that libre source code should enforce that derivations of it stay libre. Otherwise you are working for free for companies that don't care about the users.
Hey for companies is a good point. The best system for them is open source. It makes sense for them to use it. And open source is much better than just privative.
From the point of view of the individual user and developer is not that great. It kind of hooks you in because it has open source parts, but you are probably unaware of all the closed source stuff that runs in combination with it.
I get the open source point, but I don't find it fair at the long term for the individual developer and user.
Yeah, gotta’ love how all the Apple fanboys were like Bash? Meh’ zsh is the superior shell in the span of a day.
I mean was the GPL viral… yeah probably. But it’s not like the courts came after either of them. Or ever really will in a meaningful way. Although hope springs eternal for non-webkit browsers in the not-EU 😌
Bash is still in MacOS.
What’s wrong with ZSH? I was using it for 5+ years before it became the default over bash, mainly because of the auto complete features, oh-my-zsh and later just plugins and powerlevel10k.
I think they're referring to the fact that bash is GPL while ZSH is licensed permissively
Got it
Oh I didn’t think there’s anything wrong with it, I love oh-my-zsh. But it did feel like a bit of a cannery in the coal mine scenario when they elevated it the default and said they would phase out bash because of the GPL license.
I gotcha, I misunderstood. Cheers!
Yeah. And I like how even from the message it shows that it's been already well recognized by then.
If I recall correctly from some RMS' talks I've seen many years ago, they've been working on it for years before, it's just the kernel that was missing. As I see it, GNU and Linux was the breakthrough for FLOSS, since at that time you would still have to use a proprietary kernel. (Well, there's GNU Hurd, but I'm not sure if it existed at that time, and even if it did, it was not ready.)