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Posted Apr 28, 2010 9:07 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)In reply to: licence by patrick_g
Parent article: LLVM 2.7 released
>Mach/BSD cleaner and more maintainable than Linux ? Really ?
Remember we're talking about the late 1990s here, when Linux was, frankly, pretty flaky while FreeBSD powered some of the biggest internet servers. But many would say it's still true today. Don't write off the BSDs yet. They continue to get new developer talent partly because the codebase is easier to deal with and the community is friendlier than LKML.
Apple wasn't ignorant of linux: for a while they supported a port of linux to mach/ppc, MkLinux. They just decided it wasn't optimal for them.
Posted Apr 28, 2010 10:07 UTC (Wed)
by samb (guest, #32949)
[Link] (5 responses)
As late as the late 90s some people were also convinced that FreeBSD would beat out Linux wrt commercial use and contributions due to the 'more business friendly' license.
Posted Apr 28, 2010 10:36 UTC (Wed)
by trasz (guest, #45786)
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Posted Apr 28, 2010 10:41 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (3 responses)
>people were also convinced that FreeBSD would beat out Linux wrt commercial use
It did, if you count its descendants. Mac OS X installations far outnumber linux by any measure. Are you saying Apple made the wrong decision? Or are you saying that we should be unhappy because it's a proprietary system? Personally I'm happy at the success of OS X because it (a) made Unix more widespread, (b) made web developers realise that there's life beyond Win/IE, (c) gave the Linux desktop something to aim at.
Note, again, that Apple did contribute back their changes and continue to do so (latest release here). The majority of projects there are either Apple's own (APSL) or under the BSD or MIT licenses: in other words, Apple isn't being forced to do this. And if they had chosen to go with linux or another GPL'd system, it would have made no difference: they could have continued to do exactly what they're doing now.
Posted Apr 28, 2010 13:28 UTC (Wed)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
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Citation needed! And you presumably really mean desktop/notebook installations (with the iPhone included with a bit of creative interpretation), especially after having read LWN coverage of the embedded scene and how Linux seems to be rather ubiquitous, even amongst the products of large corporations.
Posted Apr 28, 2010 14:03 UTC (Wed)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (1 responses)
Huh? Have I fallen into bizzarro world? Linux is nearly completely ubiquitous. Almost anyone with an ADSL modem or home router uses it every day. Anyone using a DVR, or a load of other kinds of set-top boxes. Lots of TVs now run Linux, maybe DVD players too. I've seen printers running Linux; hell it even runs on *fridges*. Fridges!
It has a substantial share of the phone market - maybe not as large as the iPhone but not far enough behind to be completely blown away. In fact, if you pick an embedded device at random, there's a better than average chance it'll be running Linux.
In contrast, I would estimate that I've seen less than a dozen machines in the flesh running OS X, *ever*, including phones but excluding iPod shuffles and early generations. If indeed they use OS X, then you can multiply that by a very small integer.
In fact, I can't name any manufacturers making devices based on FreeBSD other than Apple (I'm sure there must be a fair few, especially things like firewalls and NAS devices, but I don't actually know of any). I don't think it can be seriously argued any more that the GPL is an impediment to commercial use of Linux, versus the commercially-friendly BSD licence.
Posted Apr 28, 2010 14:42 UTC (Wed)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
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It did, if you count its descendants. Mac OS X installations far outnumber linux by any measure.
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