On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 9:09 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

FWIW: I disagree. For details look at my discussion of rewriting Linux in RUST on quora. But a quick point is this .... Linux original took off (and was successful) not because of GPL, but in spite of it and later the GPL would help it.

Not disagreeing with you all, but: I guess it depends on where you were. In 1994-6 I worked with a friend at IBM Watson on getting netbsd going on powerpc. Linux killed that effort. It turned out that the BSD license would allow different parts of IBM to hold back code from other parts of IBM and still ship product. The GPL made such behavior much, much harder. The engineers inside IBM preferred sharing code, and the GPL made that possible. At least that's how it was explained to me.

This also proved true for some Agencies in the US Gov't as early as 1993. See this: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/LICENSE.SRC. I was there for the internal discussion which began in 1992.

Weirdly enough, though, sometimes lawyers prefer the GPL. On our third foray into getting a sane license for Plan 9 in 2013, it turned out Lucent legal preferred GPL to BSD. Go figure. I don't understand lawyers most times.