On Mon, 10 Jun 2013, Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> wrote:
Quoting Russell Coker (russell@coker.com.au):
Also the "essentially capitalist" thing is something you can only believe if you are wilfully ignorant of everything relating to GNU, Debian, or even Linux itself - remember that Minix was always the somewhat commercial OS with source available. Linus could have extended Minix but he decided to make a non- commercial OS that was totally free, he doesn't talk about freedom as much as others like RMS and he is a multi-millionaire, but that wouldn't have happened if Linux was commercial.
Excuse me, but Linux is not 'non-commercial'. It is non-proprietary, but that is a wholly different concept.
I and millions of other people use it in commerce, and it itself is also bought and so, every day.
I'm surprised to see you make that elementary gaffe in 2013.
I'm not in any way claiming that Linux can't be used commercially. I am merely arguing that it's not "essentially capitalist". Minix was created as part of a project to teach OS design and licensed to help sell a text book. That's what I call an "essentially capitalist" OS where anyone can read the source. Another example is all the proprietary Unix systems, some of which had source available at some times in the past but only *BSD were free (AFAIK - but there are so many Unix OSs that there are probably others). No-one buys Linux. You can buy a license to a binary produced by compiling the kernel source (for example Red Hat licenses their binaries but gives their source away). But with the GPL there are significant restrictions on the ways that companies can use Linux. I've been told that some companies are collaborating to replace some GPL applications and LGPL libraries with comparable programs licensed under something like the CDL or MPL to allow them to refrain from sharing source. But no-one seems to be planning that for the Linux kernel as it's too hard. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/