Lack of technologically-enforced commit restrictions *with* the GPL give Linux an edge. [LWN.net]

Lack of technologically-enforced commit restrictions with the GPL give Linux an edge.

Posted Sep 1, 2006 6:29 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322)
In reply to: GPL is the big edge of Linux over the BSDs by dwheeler
Parent article: The future of NetBSD

> So while the BSDs have lost energy every time a company gets involved,
> the GPL'ed programs gain almost every time a company gets involved.
> And that explains it all.

This is something which was always intended and understood by the
creators of the GPL. So why did commercial interests never take
an interest in the FSF's lofty proposals of collaboration before
Linux 'arrived'? Partly it's timing, but I believe it's also
the impact of technological choice on personality.

> That's not the only issue, of course. Linus is a good leader;
> leadership issues are clearly an issue for the BSDs. And Linux's
> ability early on to support dual-boot turned out to be critical
> years ago.

There's one subtle (but obvious) technical point you haven't touched
on here, which has synergies with the licence difference and the issue
of leadership: Linux source has *never* been centralised by restrictive
technology. The BSD development teams have been characterised by who
has a 'commit bit', and who has the power to grant it. BSDs have
forked not only because of commercial interference but because of
petty tousles over privilege.

In one sense, there has only ever been one committer to the Linux
kernel: Linus Torvalds himself is the only person who applies patches
to his own tree and is the sole dispenser of 'holy penguin pee'. But
*anyone* has the power to apply their own equivalent blessing to
their own version of the code, meaning that distributors and kernel
developers alike have always cooperatively maintained their own
public trees without fear of (being accused of) forking the project.
Nothing of the sort was ever possible in the BSD world.

From the start, source code management in Linux was handled by the
completely decentralised 'patch'; an inheritance from the Minix hotrodders'
community who had no rights over the original source but could swap and
improve one another's patches at will. Linus' persistent refusal to
adopt a centralised version control system which would have given the
right to 'commit' code to a select few meant that everyone has always
worked with distributed tools: patch, quilt, BK, Git.

It is this prescient understanding on Linus' part (which initially
made no sense at all to me), almost as much as the GPL's incitement
to common wealth, which allows Linux to develop at the pace it does.

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Lack of technologically-enforced commit restrictions *with* the GPL give Linux an edge.

Posted Sep 8, 2006 1:01 UTC (Fri) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link]

So why did commercial interests never take an interest in the FSF's lofty proposals of collaboration before Linux 'arrived'?

Stallman's manifesto ... read like a socialist polemic, but I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise.

Michael Tiemann

Did you forget about Cygnus? GCC has long had a reasonably healthy and productive community of commercial players. Granted, much smaller than the Linux ecosystem, but it's only a compiler, not a whole system. Indeed, the fact that GNU didn't have a complete system is probably a major reason for the lack of commercial interest. Business had little impact upon Linux until after it had proven itself as a complete system.

None of this is to deny that Linus ran his project brilliantly, while many have found RMS difficult to work with.

Lack of technologically-enforced commit restrictions *with* the GPL give Linux an edge.

Posted Sep 8, 2006 3:16 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> Did you forget about Cygnus?

Not a bit of it, but Tiemann is a bit of a visionary in his own
right, and certainly wasn't in the operating system business.

I was responding to the point above about commercial operating
systems spinning off the BSD code; some of which happened prior
to BSD becoming unencumbered. Why didn't those companies instead
join GNU, if the GPL offers such an incentive to build a commons?
As I understand it, in the earlier days of GNU Stallman hoped they
would, and approached numerous outside projects requesting their
contributions (eg the Free University Compiler Kit) and trying to
sell the idea of a collaborative project to the commercial Unix
vendors (who were at the time wasting enormous engineering effort
on 'differentiation'). RMS would have been entirely happy to use a
free BSD kernel as the basis of GNU.

The vendors *did* listen to the pitch, and such groups as OSF were
the result (they even listened to the bit about microkernels being
easy to debug :-), but they certainly didn't begin to embrace the
GPL until long after the Linux kernel project had shown that
bazaar-style development has wings. Indeed as far as I can remember
no Unix vendor conceded the advantage of the GPL until after
Microsoft's famous Halloween memo in 1998 described GNU/Linux as
'a best-of-breed Unix'. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?
The GPL always protected contributors from one another's
'differentiation' efforts, but it was the clear success of the
Linux kernel project which brought big players like SGI and IBM
into the fold.

> many have found RMS difficult to work with.

I think *that* problem was always exacerbated by the 'cathedral'
style of development common in the GNU world (and everywhere else)
before the advent of the Linux kernel. People are protective of
their projects. Setting up an alternative source repository, if
that isn't part of the normal process like it is with patch/bk/git,
is considered a hostile act. When Lucid hired a lead emacs developer,
Stallman took immediate offence and was only gradually (after the
fork was so well-developed and so many personalities bruised) persuaded
that reconciliation was in the project's best interests. The 'bazaar'
vs. 'cathedral' dichotomy, and IMO in particular the effect of the
process (inherited from the not-quite-free Minix world, which worked
rather like qmail does today) and the distributed-development *tools*
Linus has chosen all along, is nearly as significant as the difference
between copyleft and BSD licencing.

Lack of technologically-enforced commit restrictions *with* the GPL give Linux an edge.

Posted Sep 8, 2006 5:00 UTC (Fri) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link]

Tiemann is a bit of a visionary in his own right

Fair enough, but he also created a successful business around GCC, and I believe he wasn't the only one.

and certainly wasn't in the operating system business.

I didn't realize you were only talking about operating systems, but the principle should hold for other kinds of software, yes?

Why didn't those companies instead join GNU, if the GPL offers such an incentive to build a commons?

Isn't the fact that GNU didn't work yet reason enough? It seems like commercial interest in GPLed projects develops when the software provides vendors so much value that they can justify giving away much of the value they add themselves. GNU as a whole wasn't there yet. GCC was.