According to McKusick, one of the FreeBSD creators, Linus has said: “I wouldn’t have to create Linux if there wasn’t any lawsuit against BSD in the early 90`s. It wouldn’t be necesary“.
McKusick reveals Linus Torvalds confession
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I thought Linus had said this openly himself before. Here’s just one link I found that mentions it:
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Berkeley-Software-Distribu…
Linus wouldn’t have had to create Linux if Minix didn’t have such a restrictive use license. So what’s the point really?
Heck, if Hurd had been completed as originally planned, Linus wouldn’t have bothered creating Linux then either. What’s the point here?
I don’t that Linux would have existed if NT 3.51 offered a
a decent shell. Go back to 1994. I used unix as a user
for 10 years (1984 to 1994). I was getting frustrated
because I could never afford to buy a decent unix machine at home. I desperately wanted to switch to Windows but its command line threw me off. I wasn’t asking for any
of my old unix programs to run in unix. All I wanted was
a decent shell and as a programming effort it was
miniscule for Microsoft to provide.
That is when I discovered Linux. I almost cried when I
successfully installed slackware ( the most sophisticated distribution at that time). I never ever considered
Windows after that. Most people talk about switching from
Windows. I am in the minority where I consider Windows lot more difficult to use than Linux.
To summarise, if only Microsoft bothered to accomodate
unix veterans tastes in providing a decent shell (without
taking anything away from GUI) people wouldn’t have flocked
Linux.
I mean, in Debian you can choose between a Hurd, a Linux and (I think) even a BSD version. But still, I’ve chosen Linux because it’s quite good at what it does and I think it’s the most popular (and thus supported) kernel. There should be a reason that Linux is dominant in the Open Kernel market, don’t you think?
I’m pretty sure he says this in his autobiography.
@Linux domination
It only occured because:
* Unlike BSD there are no lawsuites involved.
* Big companys like IBM backed it up to fight another company – eh M$?
* It is free and GPLed
It might not be the best solution but it does work.
“There should be a reason that Linux is dominant in the Open Kernel market, don’t you think?”
That’s akin to say that sh*te gotta taste good because so many flies like it.
Yes, Linux is very good but popularity have more to do with hype than anything else.
You forget an important factor: in the FLOSS world popularity means more developers willing to submit patches.
Which in turn means better code
Which in turn means better product overall
* It is free and GPLed
(Free/Net/Open)BSD is free and BSDed. I mean that your last point is pointless IMHO as there are several free OSes. Only the second point is something differ from most other free OSes.
This is already a well known fact. We covered this in OS class in my college quite some time ago.
(Free/Net/Open)BSD is free and BSDed. I mean that your last point is pointless IMHO as there are several free OSes. Only the second point is something differ from most other free OSes.
I think the line is important. He’s saying the license as well as it being free and for some of us BSD vs GPL is a big deal, especially for the kernel. I’m sure you understand exactly why and there is no need for a flamefest about this, but I think the fact that Linux is covered under a GPL license has a lot do with it’s popularity.
Why do people care? So what? He still wanted to make Linux and is still clearly interested in it. What else really matters? Why is it that people are so interested in other’s personal opinions that change nothing?
This reads more like gossip than news.
What was the point in posting this Eugenia?
They aren’t. This thread is half filled with comments that this is no secret (blowing the lid off bad, yea I said bad cause that’s what it is, yellow, yes I said yellow and you know what that means, journalism). And there are only a few comments…
she posted it so she can stir the zealots up..
You are correct that this is tabloid journalism. It has no point as I dont see Linus switching to the BSD kernel anytime soon.
LInux has more drivers (do to more active developement). And WHO CARES, your desktop runs on all the free OS’s and its a mute point, cause all the GNU userland stuff is available for all of them, pretty much. A novice could switch between all the free *X kernels and not even know the difference, IMHO.
He said if he knew about 386/BSD he wouldnt have bothered in his book, Just for Fun. He also said if he knew about Hurd he wouldnt have bothered.
Of all 5the UNIX variants on the market today, BSD is the best one.
The GPL is a great license for businesses. See under the BSD license, I can take the whole thing, modify it and sell it with out giving back. If I am a business man, there is no sense in giving something back if my competitor can use it and then not give something back to me.
Under the GPL if I use it, I have to give back, and the same goes for my competitors. So I don’t have to worry about any one taking my profits or gaining an advantage using my work.
As a hacker I think the same way. I don’t want to write something and then someone modify it and slap it in their product and start making money, so I go for the GPL. If some one makes changes, then they have to give them back, they can still sell it, but then again, I can sell the same product…
Of course from a user point of view, none of this matters. Of course to IBM, it does matter a lot…
“Under the GPL if I use it, I have to give back, and the same goes for my competitors. So I don’t have to worry about any one taking my profits or gaining an advantage using my work”
not 100% true but close….
depending on what circumstances you are talking about…
I think this is one thing they will cover in the next version of the GPL but I am not sure they should “close” the loophole!
Go ask Apple..
The truth is, GPL is better only for those companies whose core activity is *not* software production (IBM, HP, etc), because it makes them compete more efficiently with companies whose core activity *is* software production (Microsoft, Apple, etc).
As a hacker I think the same way. I don’t want to write something and then someone modify it and slap it in their product and start making money,
If they make money, it will be because of their own source code, not yours.
If they want to sell a product, they have to make improvements worth the price – otherwise, customers will choose your freely available BSD-licensed product instead.
About the hacker thing: most programmers – especially most professional programmers – like to have a choice about what they want to do with their own source code. If they want to release it, they do it; if they want to keep it for themselves (heck, it’s their code..) they do it.
That’s why they (usually) think BSD license is better.
When you release the source code, if you do it under the BSD license you’re sure that all users can benefit from it (the users of both open source and proprietary products). If you release it under the GPL, you’re cutting away the users of the latter.
Now, of course according to Stallman & the GNU folks this is right (heck, he says using proprietary products is immoral!) but not everybody thinks like that.
but that proprietary part is what makes the bsd license a bad thing as well as a good thing…..
I grab product XYZ, work my butt off to improve product XYZ, turn it into the next great thing and I share it so others can improve upon it and extend what I have done so it can develop even faster and be even cooler but M$ comes and grabs it, adds a few lines of code and improves it considerably and adds a great feature that I had hoped to add soon, yet here I am with the old version and cannot do anything about it……
not good
He said if he knew about 386/BSD he wouldnt have bothered in his book, Just for Fun. He also said if he knew about Hurd he wouldnt have bothered.
That’s actually not what he said in his book. The only mention to the BSDs (according to the index of the book) is on page 57. There he mentions 386BSD as well as the three forks (Net, Open and Free). He also says “[m]eanwhile, all the legal haggling had been instrumental in giving a new kid on the block some time to mature and spread itself. Basically, it gave Linux time to take over the market.” Linus was well aware of the BSDs, but becaues of the lawsuit, no one knew whether they’d be around. He also knew about Hurd and mentions so on page 58 of the book. There he mentions Lars Wirzenius taking him to a talk RMS made at the Polytechnic University of Helsinki in 1991. But Hurd was (and still is today for that matter) not a usable operating system. The GNU project was also much more of a cathedral than a bazaar back then which may have also turned off Linus, but that is just my speculation. The third inexpensive/free option at the time was Minix, but AST has no interest in making Minix work on the 386 then. There were patches available, but you couldn’t redistribute a complete 386 Minix.
So, basically, Linus was well aware of the different cheap/free unix clones available at the time, but none of them suited his needs so he wrote his own. Seems to have worked well for him.
What’s to protect with Free Software? The fewer exclusive rights the author reserves to himself, the fewer things needing to be protected. The GPL is a result of the the proprietary mindset of the software industry. The BSD and similar unrestricted licenses are the result of realizing that free software cannot be stolen, misappropriated, absconded, abused, folded, spindled or mutilated.
To quote Eric Raymond, “It’s [GPL] based on the belief that open source software is weak and needs to be protected. With it, we continue injuring ourselves, cutting ourselves from the economic benefits of BSD license”
EOF
-nX
There are open source projects that are far more important than Linux. It’s nice to have more choice, but if Linux didn’t exist we would still have FreeBSD.
OTOH, if (let’s say) Apache didn’t exist, I suppose *that* would make a difference.
Looking at the stats, Apache has 70% of the market:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/06/01/june_2005_web_server_s…
And FreeBSD, even without the support/hype Linux has, is serving more web servers than any Linux distro, Red Hat included:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/07/nearly_25_million_acti…
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/14/fedora_makes_rapid_pro…
(Of course I meant serving more websites, not web servers)
You are seriously misinformed, unless you are just trying to spread FUD.
If you are the author there is nothing that prevents you use more than one license for your work. Thus there is no obstacle hindering you from using *your* gpl:ed code in any comercial setting, if you’d like that.
>You are seriously misinformed, unless you are just trying to spread FUD.
??..
Could you please quote the part of my post that you think was inaccurate?
If you are the author there is nothing that prevents you use more than one license for your work. Thus there is no obstacle hindering you from using *your* gpl:ed code in any comercial setting, if you’d like that.
This is correct, but this has *nothing* to do with what I said.
I’m still waiting for you to tell me why I would be “misinformed”, or “spreading FUD”.
I’m very careful about the accuracy of what I say.
I grab product XYZ, work my butt off to improve product XYZ, turn it into the next great thing and I share it so others can improve upon it and extend what I have done so it can develop even faster and be even cooler but M$ comes and grabs it, adds a few lines of code and improves it considerably and adds a great feature that I had hoped to add soon, yet here I am with the old version and cannot do anything about it……
Uh, what stops you from adding ‘a few lines of code and improve it considerably and add a great feature’ yourself?
nothing, but duplication of effort is a waste…
i wonder what gpl3 will say about dual license kind of stuff as well as being about to modify gpl stuff in-house and not release it or share it….
i get the feeling “freedom” is going to ramp up a bit…
i think RMS is humming
‘software everywhere just wants to be free’
(borrowing loosely)
🙂
And FreeBSD, even without the support/hype Linux has, is serving more web servers than any Linux distro, Red Hat included:
From the links you posted, I do not see how your statement is accurate. The Linux distributions outnumber the supposed 2.5 millions sites hosted by FreeBSD. Personally I do not trust this statistic.
It does not say how it determined what runs on FreeBSD; for the break down of the sites running Linux, it says it determines the distribution by Apache headers.
FreeBSD also receives a lot of hype, for a server it is not on equal footing as Linux 2.6, or even 2.4 — as many people assume.
I said:
And FreeBSD, even without the support/hype Linux has, is serving more websites than any Linux distro, Red Hat included:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/07/nearly_25_million_acti…
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/14/fedora_makes_rapid_pro…
Adam (IP: —.nap.wideopenwest.com) replied:
“From the links you posted, I do not see how your statement is accurate.”
I suggest you look better.
FreeBSD is serving 2.5 million websites (July 2004, having had a 25% increase in a year).
Red Hat is serving 1.6 million websites (March 2005). Any other Linux distro is under 800,000.
I really think that from the links I posted my statement is quite accurate, so I’m gonna repeat it: FreeBSD is serving more websites than any Linux distro, Red Hat included.
“Personally I do not trust this statistic.”
Oh, this is a completely different issue.
Netcraft is usually considered an authority in this field. But of course, if your sources say something different, feel free to share them, since I’m really curious.
(..Yes, I’m pretty confident that no reliable source says anything different).
Besides being troll-bait the point is what? Must be a slow day in the OS world.
but that proprietary part is what makes the bsd license a bad thing as well as a good thing…..
I grab product XYZ, work my butt off to improve product XYZ, turn it into the next great thing and I share it so others can improve upon it and extend what I have done so it can develop even faster and be even cooler but M$ comes and grabs it, adds a few lines of code and improves it considerably and adds a great feature that I had hoped to add soon, yet here I am with the old version and cannot do anything about it……
not good
It depends.
If your code is good and your great unwritten feature is worth implementing for other OSS people, they’ll add it anyway, despite of license you choose (BSD or GPL).
Additionally, if you’re using BSD license, you may be happy about some companies will use your code – this means it is SO good. Of course this doesn’t prohibit you advance your code further.
If nobody’s wanting to improve your code, then probably it is not so good or interesting; in that case neither license won’t stop you coding further. If your code improves, it may eventually fall into previous case. If not, no company will use it either.
If your code is very good and usable and at some moment you want to start sell your product, then BSD doesn’t limit you in any way. But if you’ve made your code open under GPL, you’ve bound to it (most probably at this stage you already have lot of contributors to your project and you cannot change licensing model so easily). You may consider double licensing, but this will pay off only if your product poses great interest to companies. This may happen, but needs very mature product.
… probably you wouldn’t think that’s gossip or tabloid jornalism. I guess people know that Linus will never switch to BSD, of course.
That’s just an interesting and relevant quote of kernel Linux creator mentioned by the FreeBSD creator. That’s the point. There are no great competition between Linus and Kirk. He mentioned Linus as a proof of BSD uqality. Maybe because he considers Linus a great developer. Just maybe…
Why are you so concerned about relevance that loose your time answering such an irrelevant thing?
Well, I think this is a very curious thing to know
It does not mean anything, nor that one is better than the other, its just funny to know that mainly when you know Kirk McKusick and had just listen to him sayng that Linus is a genius.
Have fun!
This is the pausus I have an issue with:
About the hacker thing: most programmers – especially most professional programmers – like to have a choice about what they want to do with their own source code. If they want to release it, they do it; if they want to keep it for themselves (heck, it’s their code..) they do it.
That’s why they (usually) think BSD license is better.
How does GPL prevent you from doing what you want (i.e limit choice) with your own code? How does that make BSD any better? Bullshit or FUD, pick your choice.
I wrote:
About the hacker thing: most programmers – especially most professional programmers – like to have a choice about what they want to do with their own source code. If they want to release it, they do it; if they want to keep it for themselves (heck, it’s their code..) they do it.
That’s why they (usually) think BSD license is better.
“Anonymous (IP: —.015-55-74686e1.cust.bredbandsbolaget.se)” replied:
How does GPL prevent you from doing what you want (i.e limit choice) with your own code? How does that make BSD any better? Bullshit or FUD, pick your choice.
I pick the third option (i.e. truth), of course. What I wrote is totally accurate.
If you write an extension to a GPL’d software, every time you distribute the binary of your extension you are *obliged* to release your source code under the GPL.
To answer your question, this is exactly “how GPL prevents you from doing what you want (i.e limit choice) with your own code”.
Of course when the original program is distributed under the BSD the issue doesn’t exist, because you can write an extension for it and then do what you want with your own source code.
Of course I’m not implying, as your answer is suggesting, that the GPL applied to *your* code limits your freedom.
That would be false: since you’re the copyright owner, obviously you can access your own source code bypassing the GPL. That’s quite obvious, I think. So, it wouldn’t be *your* freedom of choice to be limited, but the freedom of choice of *other developers* writing extensions to your software, or even simply linking their binaries to yours.
As I already said, what limits *your* freedom of choice is the GPL applied by other people to *their* code, in case your code is an extension for it (or in case you simply link your binaries to theirs).
Now that I explained why what I wrote is totally accurate, I expect you to take back that “Bullshit or FUD” thing. If you want to be honest, of course.
The GPL makes opensource software extremely unlikely to fail.
The BSDL allows this possibility. This is why i prefer the GPL and why alot of others do too.
>The GPL makes opensource software extremely unlikely to fail.
This statement is a good example of how some people see the use of open source software in proprietary products as a “failure”.
I think it’s a success, not a failure. And I can reasonably assert that BSD users/developers think the same.
When open source code is used in a proprietary product, I wonder *who’s* losing.
The users? Nope, they have more choice and better products – that is, they’re winning.
The open source developers? Nope. They’re not selling anything (open source is free as in beer), so they don’t have “competitors”. In the worst scenario, they are *untouched*, and equally untouched is the open source software they’re working on. In the best scenario, they receive contributions from the commercial developers who are using their code.
Those who *like* to use open source software (like me, btw)? Nope, the open source software is still there, if they want they can simply ignore the proprietary alternatives.
Those who are out on a *war* against proprietary software? Yes. They are *the only ones* who lose. And this is the *only* reason for the existence of the GPL. To everybody else, the BSD and academic licenses in general (MIT, X, etc) are obviously a better choice.
P.S. I’m still waiting for Anonymous (IP: —.015-55-74686e1.cust.bredbandsbolaget.se) to take back that “Bullshit or FUD” thing.