Comment Re:Code reinvestment and positive feedback loops. (Score 1) 178
Apple has a bunch of BSD code they've modified and never given out. I did not claim that they never do, but they tend not to.
And the FreeBSD people would have absolutely not problem with this, assuming it were true. But alas, it isn't true. It just happens that most of Apple's changes aren't incorporated into FreeBSD because it just doesn't make much sense for them to be (e.g. the changes are particular to Apple products or their own operating system), but they do release those changes in the open source version of their OS (Darwin). The parts of Mac OS X that aren't open source or distributed with Darwin are mostly parts which didn't come from FreeBSD anyway. Other code released by Apple that is more general and more appropriate for FreeBSD (like LLVM) is used by FreeBSD.
Regardless, it's a common argument that the GPL has supposedly helped Linux become what it is, but that really short-changes Linux which is really just a kick-ass kernel regardless of the license. The reason Linux "won" over BSD-licensed alternatives was not because of the GPL but because of fortunate timing (USL v. BSDi was obviously a major setback for BSD) and also because Linux is a great kernel.
The GPL itself doesn't do anything to promote a strong free software environment. It just creates a lot of license compatibility problems within a community that would otherwise work better with less duplicated effort. It doesn't even succeed at forcing companies to "give back," it just forces the use of ugly hacks (see how binary blob drivers are implemented). The free software environment already incentivizes companies to "give back," without the need for complicated and incompatibility-inducing license terms, because of reduced maintenance costs (e.g. do companies really want to spend the money maintaining their own fork or patchset? really?), and there are also many good business reasons for a company to release their own code without the GPL supposedly forcing their hand (e.g. to promote interoperability with their products). It's interesting to recognize that most new code released by companies today are not copyleft-licensed but are usually licensed under an Apache license or the MIT or BSD licenses.
Stallman and the FSF should be given credit for the many positive contributions they have made to the free/open source community (GCC and the GNU userland are fantastic and well appreciated), but the GPL just isn't one of those positive contributions.