Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> But that's only if you want to mix code.

Yes, although any GPL program in the BSD land cannot grant the same freedoms than BSD programs and will have to be filtered out for some use cases, which weakens the point of the BSD distributions a bit. That's not only the kernel, it's also userspace tools.

> It's more the GNU crowd making this a huge thing, the BSD approach is more like "do whatever you want"

I don't believe this to be the case. Some people in the BSD world are adamant that their code should not be contaminated by the GPL for instance because suddenly, they could not grant the rights to their users to take the code and put it into a proprietary product.

Some people in the BSD world have a strong opinion on how permissive licenses are the right way to do open source / free software.

> the GNU crowd making this a huge thing

I believe this to be a huge thing though. It is a huge thing. You should care what people can and cannot do with your code. Maybe you care that people can do "whatever you want" with your code. I think it's worth stopping and thinking about this stuff and the consequences for a moment, at least once. The world is very little "don't care, whatever", things have consequences and maybe you care about some of them. Surely you deeply care about some things? (of course there's no bad answer, you can answer no)

I myself think the GPL is the better option in most cases, because I care that the end users' freedom is guaranteed. I pretty much don't want developers to do "whatever they want" with my work, I want them to respect their own users' freedom. This is highly political/philosophical of course.

(there are exceptions, for example for codecs you might want the code to be as permissive as possible so the free codec itself is spread and is not replaced with a proprietary one for instance)




> The world is very little "don't care, whatever", things have consequences and maybe you care about some of them. Surely you deeply care about some things? (of course there's no bad answer, you can answer no)

Yes I care very much about people making their own decisions in their own lives (e.g. LGBT, abortion etc) and with ever more restrictive laws (even here in Europe) I kinda just have given up on the law in general. I just shrug at it while the extreme-right tries to curtail our rights (in my country a quarter of people voted extreme-right in our last election). I just don't think legalese is the way to protect this. It's not working anyway.

Also I'm just totally not a 'team player' so I don't care about loyalty to a party, group or country.

> I myself think the GPL is the better option in most cases, because I care that the end users' freedom is guaranteed. I pretty much don't want developers to do "whatever they want" with my work, I want them to respect their own users' freedom. This is highly political/philosophical of course.

I don't think the GPL is very good at this. The BSD license is seen as more friendly to business but in practice it gives users more freedom. Especially because the GPL protects the rights of all contributors including corporate ones, the corporate market loves GPL much more and thus is more involved. Which always comes with more strings attached. I view GPL more as protection of the authors, not the end users.

The few times serious tinkering was done by commercial entities in BSD it was basically a huge disaster: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...


> I care very much about people making their own decisions in their own lives (e.g. LGBT, abortion etc)

Totally with you on this

(and that's why I think the software industry should be producing free software for people. So they can make their own decisions without depending on their original providers. Of course, free software is not a sufficient condition to this.)

> I kinda just have given up on the law in general.

Okay, but I hope you'll understand many of us don't see this as an option.

> I don't think the GPL is very good at this. [...]

I don't see how end users have more freedoms with BSD programs and how the GPL comes with more strings attached for the user (who doesn't intend to build proprietary software - of course I'm against this so if you see this as an attached string, I see this string in good light).

> I view GPL more as protection of the authors, not the end users.

I think you are wrong on this. The user owes nothing to the author of a GPL program. They can modify it without contributing back. The authors are not guaranteed to see the improvements to their code, also users are guaranteed the freedoms that come with free software, even for the derivatives (this is where the GPL shines, in my view, compared to permissive licenses).


2021 became boring some time ago, don't cha know, daddy-o?

> commercial entities

iXsystems, Inc.: sponsored commits in three FreeBSD source trees:

https://gist.github.com/grahamperrin/eb0bf1a03b64e14d9288cbd...

Created last week, a snapshot of that point in time, I don't intend to update it.


> Some people in the BSD world are adamant that their code should not be contaminated by the GPL

Yes, and? They want people to be able to use their code freely, without limitations. Check golang packages, they are mostly BSD/MIT.

Thats why BSD is in Playstation and Macs. You think there would be linux GPLed code? There is a usecase for everything and linux doesnt cover them all.


>> Some people in the BSD world are adamant that their code should not be contaminated by the GPL

> Yes, and?

And? Nothing. I'm making an observation, I'm not judging here. They have a strong stance on this, often because they deeply thought about the consequences. I don't agree with them, and I don't care for helping Apple and Sony make their proprietary products, I think we'd probably be in a better world if they participated in improving the commons and that's actually how Linux succeeds, but I respect this stance when it's well thought out.


I think that there is completely different reason why they dont participate in improving the linux. As its fundamental mantra of "move fast, break things" is creating bigger and bigger gnordian knot, while FreeBSD mantra is being well though, designed and stable. SystemD will never get into FreeBSD. Docker is still behind FreeBSD jails (released 2000!) that are a security feature since the start. And so on. And people using and developing it, like such system, which linux is absolutely not.

For fun check this beauty: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=setfib&apropos=0&s...

This why we use FreeBSD. As not only its kernel but also its userspace is well designed.


The *BSD have their merits beyond licensing matters indeed, including technical, design, organizational. That's what would make me look into them.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: