From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Or on the flip side, they want usage to be pervasive so they win. I mean come on man it's like "move this file" and "make this directory".
these applications aren't rocket science and providing them under a license that people will use outside of the hardcore Linux space is just good marketing.
I assume this is in reference to the rust coreutils being MIT-licensed. How would using GPL benefit them?
Improvements would be upstreamed. Not with MIT
GPL would not require that. It would only require publication of the source. There is no requirement to give back or even make your changes compatible with upstream.
True.
Though, you are probably going to have a much easier time implementing a change to your code that is present in a company's published code, than you would trying to reverse-engineer a binary.
Sharing of the code I would consider "giving back" in it of itself.
Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available? Nobody cares but they do.
Why do they?
They are BSD licensed (very similar to MIT). According to the crowd here, Apple would never Open Source their changes. Yet, in the real world, they do.
Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.
How do we explain that?
There are many companies that use BSD as a base. None of them have take the BSD utils “commercial”.
Why not?
Most of the forks have been other BSD distros. Or Chimera Linux.
How about OpenSSH?
It is MiT licensed. Shouldn’t somebody have embraced, extended, and extinguished it by now?
Why haven’t they?
"Commercial" is not the opposite of free/libre. In fact, GPL licensed software can be "taken commercial" with a guarantee that it will remain libre, whereas BSD-licensed software doesn't have those guarantees.