I so wish that FreeBSD was GPL. I know this won't be a popular opinion, but I believe that success Linux has had is because of copyleft, and *BSD are riding on the coat tails of that.
But I don't like Linux. I use it daily, but I don't like it. I wish FreeBSD held the position Linux does in the market today. That would be heaven.
> but I believe that success Linux has had is because of copyleft
No, the success Linux has had is because it ran on the machines people had at home, and was very easy to try out.
An instructive example would be my own path into Linux: I started with DJGPP, but got annoyed because it couldn't multi-task (if you started a compilation within an IDE like Emacs, you had to wait until it finished before you could interact with the IDE again). So I wanted a real Unix, or something close enough to it.
The best option I found was Slackware. Back then, it could install directly into the MS-DOS partition (within the C:\LINUX directory, through the magic of the UMSDOS filesystem), and boot directly from MS-DOS (through the LOADLIN bootloader). That is: like DJGPP, it could be treated like a normal MS-DOS program (with the only caveat being that you had to reboot to get back to MS-DOS). No need to dedicate a partition to it. No need to take over the MBR or bootloader. It even worked when the disk used Ontrack Disk Manager (for those too young to have heard of it, older BIOS didn't understand large disks, so newer HDDs came bundled with software like that to workaround the BIOS limitations; Linux transparently understood the special partition scheme used by Ontrack).
It worked with all the hardware I had, and worked better than MS-DOS; after a while, I noticed I was spending all my time booted into Linux, and only then I dedicated a whole partition to it (and later, the whole disk). Of course, since by then I had already gotten used to Linux, I stayed in the Linux world.
What I've read later (somewhere in a couple of HN comments) was that, beyond not having all these cool tricks (UMSDOS, LOADLIN, support for Ontrack partitions), FreeBSD was also picky with its hardware choices. I'm not sure that the hardware I had would have been fully supported, and even if it were, I'd have to dedicate a whole disk (or, at least, a whole partition) to it, and it would also take over the boot process (in a way which probably would be incompatible with Ontrack).
> FreeBSD was also picky with its hardware choices. I'm not sure that the hardware I had would have been fully supported
Copy / paste of my comment from last year about FreeBSD
I installed Linux in fall 1994. I looked at Free/NetBSD but when I went on some of the Usenet BSD forums they basically insulted me saying that my brand new $3,500 PC wasn't good enough.
The main thing was this IDE interface that had a bug. Linux got a workaround within days or weeks.
The BSD people told me that I should buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM. I was a sophomore in college and I saved every penny to spend $2K on that PC and my parents paid the rest. I didn't have any money for that.
The sound card was another issue.
I remember software based "WinModems" but Linux had drivers for some of these. Same for software based "Win Printers"
When I finally did graduate and had money for SCSI stuff I tried FreeBSD around 1998 and it just seemed like another Unix. I used Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Ultrix, IRIX. FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.
I don’t disagree with what you say. But why did Linux work on all that hardware? I assert that if you trace that line of thinking to its conclusion, the answer is the GPL.
Many people and organizations adapted BSD to run on their hardware, but they had no obligation to upstream those drivers. Linux mandated upstreaming (if you wanted to distribute drivers to users).
That's actually true, if they wanted to distribute a linux compatible driver they had to make it available for anyone to upstream it in the linux kernel.
Probably GPL was indeed a factor that made device makers and hackers to create open source drivers for linux. I am not convinced that it was a major one.
I'd say with modern hardware, like the xe Intel iGPUs on 11th gen Intel and up got driver attention quickly. Some things like realtek 2.5gb NICs took a little while to integrate but I think realtek offered kernel modules. I remember NIC compatibility was sparse when I started playing with it around 1999-2000. What trips me up is command flags on gnu vs freebsd utils, ask me about the time I DOSed the Colo from the jump machine using the wrong packet argument interval.
>>I believe that success Linux has had is because of copyleft, and *BSD are riding on the coat tails of that.
Apparently many here are unaware of the history and story as to what stalled FreeBSD in a long lawsuit involving ATT. You need to read up on that. Copyleft had nothing to do with it.
What would FreeBSD as GPL give you? You could fork it and release FreeGPL with that license tomorrow. (Minus ZFS, but that's in contrib)
Some users of FreeBSD prefer more freedoms than GPL offers. The contributors must not be put off by providing more freedoms.
Places I've worked have contributed changes to FreeBSD and Linux, mostly for the same reason ... regardless of any necessity from distributing code under license, it's nicer to keep your fork close to upstream and sending your changes upstream helps keep things close.
IANAL, but you can’t actually just relicense code, even if it’s under BSD‐like license. What you can do is to release this code in the binary form without providing the source code.
I don't understand this thinking. The GPL is more restrictive than the FreeBSD license. You have more freedoms with the FreeBSD license than you do with the GPL(of any version).
> I wish FreeBSD held the position Linux does in the market today. That would be heaven.
Well The BSD's were embattled with a lawsuit from AT&T at the time Linux came around, so it got a late start as it were, even if it's a lot older.
I don't know about that... Llvm didn't exist until 2003. The BSDs and Linux both existed for a long time before that, and Linux already had much more momentum at that point.
BSD was mired in the uncertainty of a lawsuit over some of their code at the time that Linux was getting started, and the FUD around that gave Linux a head start that BSD had up until that point, so you can't infer much about the reasons Linux's early success over BSD through that fog. If Linux had been dealing with the same problem that BSD had instead, BSD almost certainly would be in Linux's place right now.
To be fair, GCC's design was motivated by the same thing as the license. They intentionally didn't modularize GCC so that it couldn't be used by non-free code.
> Anything that makes it easier to use GCC back ends without GCC front ends--or simply brings GCC a big step closer to a form that would make such usage easy--would endanger our leverage for causing new front ends to be free.
> I wish FreeBSD held the position Linux does in the market today. That would be heaven.
I don't. That would break everything I love about it. If it was as big as Linux there would be a lot of corpo suits influence, constant changes, constant drive to make it 'mainstream' etc. All the things I hate about Linux.
Linux is OK. It’s a mess compared to BSD, but it’s OK. It’s the lazy man’s solution. It’s mainly for people who only want to “docker compose up” and walk away. The art of the OS has been lost. People think the OS is something to be abstracted away as much as possible and it’s evil and hard to secure. Shame.
I need to tinker less because there's no distro maintainers that constantly change stuff.
It did take a while to set it up but then it runs fine. I don't view my OS as a hobby, but I do want to have full control over it and to be able to understand how it works. I don't want to have to trust a commercial party to act in my best interests, because they don't. The current mess that is windows, full of ads and useless ai crap, mandatory telemetry, forced updates, constantly trying to sell their cloud services etc is a good example. FreeBSD doesn't do any of those things.
Most Linuxes don't either but there's still a lot of corpo influence. I feel like it's becoming a playing ball of big tech. You only need to see how many corp suits are on the board of the Linux foundation, how many patches are pushed by corp employees as part of their job etc. I don't want them to have that much influence over my OS. I don't believe in a win-win concerning corporate involvement in open-source.
FreeBSD has a little bit of that (netgate's completely botched wireguard is and example) but lessons are learned.
>no distro maintainers that constantly change stuff.
This is one of those things that mom-Linux people think but isn't really true. I can think of two episodes in the last decade (systemd and Wayland) that constituted controversial changes but frankly there are people who make "not using systemd" their entire identity and it's just so much cringe.
Even on a rolling release bleeding edge distro like Fedora things really don't change that much at all.
>I don't view my OS as a hobby, but I do want to have full control over it and to be able to understand how it works.
FreeBSD doesn't afford you any more or less control over how the system works than Linux.
> FreeBSD doesn't afford you any more or less control over how the system works than Linux.
And yet, I'm constantly patching and working around lib issues on Linux (on the desktop), but never with FreeBSD. That's the point being made. Linux is a lot of stuff mashed together to make a system, and it works really well, but FreeBSD is a collection of components carefully curated and maintained as one and works very, very well most of the time.
If Linux works for you, use it. No one is trying to convert you.
Ah, mom-Linux: the only distro where the kernel scheduler runs on WINE, sudo doesn't actually give you real permissions, your /home directory is routinely cleaned without your permission, and the parent process always knows what the child process is up to.
freebsd didn't have the hardware support base that linux did and suffered a huge delay in rearchitecture when x86 smp hardware became widely available. (only one cpu could be in the kernel at a time, the "bkl", was a major impediment in the early 00s). freebsd had better resource scheduling at the time and a beloved networking stack, but linux caught up with cgroups etc. i think linux was also just a trendy vanguard of sorts as the world learned of open source software by and of the internet.
I have seen this particular idea come up a lot lately.
Personaly I think Intel's early investment in linux had a lot to do with it. They also sold a compiler and marketed to labs and such which bought chips. So linux compatibility meant a lot to decision makers.
AMD the underdog went more in on Linux compat than NVIDIA. Which may have been a business decsion.
I dunno, maybe the GPL effect was more a market share thing with developers than a copyleft thing.
Nota Bene: I do love copyleft and license all my own projects AGPL
I feel the same, because it seems that the only desktop-ready OS under GPL today is GNU/Linux, and it feels too bloated nowadays (not to mention that Linux is effectively stuck under GPLv2). Something like FreeBSD feels much lighter and better still being desktop‐ready. Looks like that guys from Hyperbola think the same and that’s why they are doing HyperbolaBSD.
Btw there’s some progress in GNU Hurd, but they are still far from being desktop-ready.
There needs to be a new rule in technical discussion communities that outlaws bland comments that just spew "too bloated" and "feels much lighter". It is completely useless fluff description text.
No, it’s just you having some strange prejudices about these words (probably driven by blind faith in some overhyped technologies), so go better overregulate your preferred echo chamber.
They now provide at least somehow working x86_64 images. It’s of course funny for a project started in the 90s to get x86_64 support only in the 2020s, but it’s still progress in relative terms.
Same as anything else installed as a binary package - you trust the people packaging/providing the binary. If you don't, build it yourself. The source is publicly available.
But I don't like Linux. I use it daily, but I don't like it. I wish FreeBSD held the position Linux does in the market today. That would be heaven.