I would posit that Linux's success is DUE TO the GPL [LWN.net]

I would posit that Linux's success is DUE TO the GPL

Posted Jul 1, 2005 22:42 UTC (Fri) by rknop (guest, #66)
Parent article: ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet)

I'm speaking out of my mouth here, without any data or analysis to back it up, but here's an idea I think worth considering.

Linux would not be as big, or as prominent in education and business, as it is today WITHOUT the GPL.

Reason: it would have been embraced and extended. From the point of view, Linux would have bene synonmous with Red Hat. (Indeed, it was, even in our with-GPL world, and still is to many.) However, without the GPL, at some point somebody in Red Hat would probably have figured out that they could ensure customer loyalty by not pubishing their extentions as open source. There would have been proprietary extensions in the most used distribution, and that would have become the business world's Linux.

Then Microsoft would have had a target to buy, and that would have been that.

Sure, Linux would continue to exist, as *BSD exists now, but it would still be in the state that it was in the lat 90's -- used by geeks and hobbyists, and by people who really knew what they were doing, but not widely recognized as an operating system that was a player. Just as Solaris and other proprietary Unix derivatives were much more important players in the early to mid 90's than the BSD from whom they heavily borrowed.

The fact that Linux was GPL meant that no company could completely take it over. The best they could do was offer the best support and services possible, so that people would want to stay with them; but no company could count on the sort of lock-in to the same level as Microsoft. That meant that there was no single target whose going down would take down Linux, either by being bought by Microsoft or just by drifting out of existence (as, say, Commodore did to the Amiga).

The GPL has been a huge philosophical boon to the free software community. It has also been a huge practical boon.

-Rob

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