undefined | Better HN

0 pointslittlestymaar20d ago0 comments

Linux won against the multiple proprietary Unixes because it forced corporations to contribute back instead of keeping their secret sauce for themselves.

0 comments

PunchyHamster20d ago

And same corporations are now pushing BSD license at every avenue just to avoid having to do that.

jason_oster20d ago

This confuses the economics of open source. It's easier to contribute changes upstream than maintaining a fork. A smart business decision is using permissively licensed software that is maintained by other teams (low maintenance cost) while contributing patches upstream when the need arises (low feature cost).

Bringing a fork in-house and falling behind on maintenance is a very bad idea. The closest I've ever come to that in industry was deploying a patch before the PR was merged.

littlestymaarOP19d ago

Proprietary Unixes were literally that at the scale of an entire OS.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse