FreeBSD and the GPL

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Dozens of companies contribute to the Linux kernel, and get the benefits of the contributions of all the others. They do not contribute out of generosity, but because this effect has made it possible to port anything to anything at a vastly reduced cost, because the costs are shared.

This effect may or may not have been a factor in the original adoption of GNU/Linux, but has worked to the long term advantage of its many participants.

Very few companies are in the pure operating system business. The operating system is a facilitator, not the business. Companies don't use GNU/Linux because of sentimental attachment to Linux, or the GPL, or "open source". They use GNU/Linux and free software because it makes business sense. And the GPL, which gives assurance of the continued freedom and commonality of the code, is the driver behind it.

Changing the world

If FreeBSD had been licensed under the GPL things might have been different. But then again, probably not.

The BSD hackers have an aphorism that speaks some truths, which says "BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC."

This aphorism speaks of a difference in the cultures that is greater than the words contained within it.

Free software was a world changing idea that the Linux community managed to both capture and encapsulate, and the atmosphere of do-it-yourself - anyone can do that - I can do this - you can do that - which surrounded GNU/Linux made it possible for everyone and anyone to become involved - and they did, and ported GNU/Linux to everything and anything, and if it didn't work, there was every chance that it might later.

The model that grew around Linux gave everybody the chance to take part and make a difference. You could do anything with GNU/Linux. If you couldn't write code you could write documentation, host web sites, make friends or sell T-Shirts. The GPL worked well for the long term interests of the Unix companies, but the motive for adopting GNU/Linux over FreeBSD almost certainly had more to do with its growing ecosphere and popularity among a new breed of developers who brought something different to the mix.

Part of this effect was that there was a project to port Linux to the IBM mainframe, which was taken up by a skunkworks project inside IBM - from which other things followed. Linux was already available for IBM hardware, and had become scalable from the wristwatch to the mainframe, because those who worked on it, and those who used it, said it would.

The disco years

The reverberations from the Balkanisation of Unix in the eighties, the legal and political furore that engulfed the BSDs in the early nineties, and the excitement around Linux worked against the adoption of BSD - but the BSD developers didn't care for the hubbub that Linux attracted anyway.

Jordan Hubbard, one of the founders of the FreeBSD project put his feelings into words. "If FreeBSD were a respected musical entertainer, I would want her to be the one who stuck to doing the kind of music she liked and always did it well", he wrote, "rather than horrifying us during the disco years by suddenly putting on spandex pants and lip-syncing to formulaic, song-factory material, or shrieking out heavy-metal lyrics in heavy makeup with Axel Rose 10 years later."

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