Only that an OS and an app have different characteristics when it comes to the license issue. First, OSes are far more complex. Second, for gadget makers who need an embedded OS, the OS is just the foundation of a software stack, and its usually 'hidden', so gadget makers will have less of an issue with using an OS that their competitors can also use (and see). For those 2 reasons the enforced collaboration/sharing that the GPL requires makes more sense for some companies/people.

My previous/current comments were/are referring to code that is distributed, thus my examples involving companies using an embedded OS on consumer products.

Besides, private forks are irrelevant to this discussion since they don't need a license anyway.

Encourages, but doesn't require, unless the GPL is used. Some companies will not consider it acceptable to risk contributing if their competitors are not also required to accept the exact same risks (and rewards). Thus a level playing field.

No, they're choosing a GPLed OS rather then a BSDed OS precisely because of the license, but not for the usual 'religious' reasons. Again, as above, its a level playing field.

We're talking about a hypothetical here, the history doesn't help us.

I never claimed the GPL works for everyone, only that it works better for some.

Thank you. The whole 'GNU zealots' thing is getting real old, especially since real 'GNU zealots' are as rare as hen's teeth around here.

This is where we (still) disagree. I don't believe the BSDed OSes would 'win' just because they arrived first, and by the same reasoning I believe Linux is not as popular as it is just because it arrived first.

So as soon as our hypothetical GPLed OS did become available, those companies/people for whom the GPL works better would migrate to it because it *does* work better for them, no matter how long the prior BSDed OSes had been around.

If one license is universally better than the other one, in all circumstances, then we'll inevitably see a movement to that one 'superior' license. The fact that that doesn't appear to be happening tells me that the licensing does matter, and that the different licenses are useful to different people (or the same folks but in different circumstances).

That strikes me as a really odd thing to say. Most people put more thought into what license they chose than this. Linux is no longer a young project, yet Linus himself has said he doesn't regret using the GPL, and Linus did give it a lot of thought, after all, he deliberately chose to use GPLv2-only, if he had done as you suggest he'd have used the default GPLv2-or-later without thinking twice about it.

Perhaps the BSD will gain on the GPL, and if it does then great, I have no problem with that (I love competition, and abhor monopolies - of any kind), but to believe something is popular because its users are basically idiots (thats what you're implying here, even if you didn't mean to) is illogical in this case given that the users we're talking about are mostly fairly intelligent computer programmers. After all, not all FOSS code out there is being written by 'stupid amateurs' who just pick their software license based on its 'buzz-factor' or by flipping a coin. :)

Seriously, do you really believe that some/many coders who go to the trouble of writing an app and releasing it to the public, just use whichever license they think is the most popular?

My guess is that those people are so few as to just be statistical noise...

Thing is, you're the only one who keeps bringing this point up, it was never part of the original issue, and the post you initially responded to said nothing about this.

Now here's the problem you have: there are plenty of people who agree with your point above... but also use the GPL. To them, you're starting off on a GPL rant, and ending up on piracy/MPAA/whatever, is merely going off-topic, not making a point.

I'd suggest that you actually verify your implicit assumption that everyone who advocates the use of the GPL also advocates piracy, and once you discover this assumption is false, save the second half of your rant just for those to whom it actually applies.

None of your contrary examples are operating systems.

You forgot the other group that has become very significant to the relative success of Linux: commercial companies that use Linux (and contribute code to it) because they know their competitors can't take anything they contribute, put it in a closed-source alternative, and use it against them. Meanwhile, they all get the advantage from the code contributions of others. Its a more level playing field for many commercial entities, and they don't have the hassle of maintaining their own private fork.

It all depends on the nature of the market. For normal apps, the license issue is not that significant (except to the zealots - on whichever side), but, as an example, for commercial companies who need an embedded OS for something (where the OS itself is not the center-piece of their product - thus the fact that their competitors can use it too is irrelevant), the license really does make a difference, and many of them are deliberately choosing the GPLed Linux (for completely agnostic, practical reasons).

The point I'm trying to make here is that the license issue is actually important (in both directions) to a *lot* of people/companies, not just the 'zealots' (of either side).

No, but then again, if Linus hadn't of done it, it would only have been a matter of time before someone else released a GPLed OS kernel, and once that happened, I believe the same results would have happened as well: it would have become popular despite the pre-existence of the BSDs, because for some people, and for some companies in some markets, the GPL makes better sense for them.

You sound like you desperately want to believe the only reason the GPL and Linux is so widespread is because of zealotry, but I don't see that, there just aren't that many GPL zealots out there (they're obviously badly outnumbered here on /.). RMS's army of smelly, bearded holy warriors isn't *that* big. :)

There really is more going on here than just zealotry...

Ok, I'll admit that I've never tried to compile OO.o (when I did try it I just used the prebuilt *-bin version, but ended up just using KOffice since my needs in that area are really minimal), so its still probably the best example of an extremely long compile time for a single package/app. However, its now on a very short list.

Except Debian, and especially Ubuntu, have enough fans around here to usually mod those jokes below my threshold.

Jokes about specific problems are routine, but tend to fade eventually, once the original problem has long gone away. The Gentoo jokes have been around since the beginning though, and are still with us, even though some of them are no longer applicable.

Oh I know, the Gentoo jokes meme is the longest running one here, so I'm used to it.

I think it was mainly your comment tacked on at the end that got me to respond in the first place. After all, you were, in effect, demanding that I ignore a 'joke' that simply no longer matches the reality that a typical Gentoo user sees now.

Sure, we still have long compiles for some things, or when upgrading a lot at the same time, but the computer-is-useless-while-updating part of the meme *really* doesn't make any sense anymore, at least not on modern hardware.

But I'll try to thicken my skin some more anyway, as it looks like this meme is just too popular for it to go away anytime soon... :)

To be fair, Obama did have big, ambitious plans for NASA, but that was before the economy tanked...

A mission to Europa is being planned too (see the post upstream of us about how they plan to test the Europa probe here on Earth by using an Antarctic under-the-ice lake).

The only difference is that this one to Titan is actually easier/cheaper to do, which is why it may happen first, but eventually Europa will be seeing a probe from us as well (pending approval from 'Dave', of course).

But since the LGPL explicitly allows dynamic linking, and ffmpeg is LGPLed, the FSF's definition of a "derived work" is *still* irrelevant to the current subject.

Logical fallacy. The part of this sentence before the comma has no connection *whatsoever* with the rest.

Using dynamic linking to avoid patent issues is possible simply because it means you don't have to *distribute* the patent-encumbered code *yourself*. At no time does the "derived work" issue come into play, because thats not what any party here is either claiming or worrying about.

To show you where you've gone wrong here, please note that the FSF's interpretation of "derived work" has nothing to do with distribution! (Which is ironic, given that the language of the GPL itself is mostly focused on distribution.) Anyway, according to them you are violating the GPL whether *you* distribute that GPLed library or not, because in their view its merely the act of *linking* that causes this particular violation of the GPL, distribution has nothing to do with it. Whereas with the patent problem, avoiding the distribution of the patent-encumbered code entirely solves the problem... and it just so happens that dynamic linking allows you to do exactly that.

So, in a hypothetical situation where you used a GPLed library with patent-encumbered code, by distributing only your app and not the library (requiring your users to get the lib themselves), you'd avoid the patent issue entirely, but *still* be violating the GPL according to the FSF. Note that this asymmetry also applies if the situation were reversed: if you complied with the GPL by GPLing your app, and then distributed the lib with your app, you'd be fine as far as the GPL was concerned but *still* be violating someone's patent. Thus these 2 issues are not connected in the way you think.

Now again, since the ffmpeg is not GPLed, none of this is relevant to the current subject, my point here is that you're mixing up 2 completely unrelated issues: distribution versus linking.

Note that I'm also *not* interested in defending or arguing about the FSF's interpretation of "derived work", partly because I'm not sure I entirely agree with it myself, but mainly because only the SCOTUS can decide whether they are right or wrong, everyone else is just pontificating pointlessly. In any case, it has no relevance here.

So? MS's goal for Silverlight is to kill Flash, so 'watching video online' is the only thing that matters as far as Silverlight adoption goes, and if Moonlight will never have the DRM and all the proprietary codecs that Silverlight has, it means Moonlight is utterly worthless, which was what the GP was alluding to.

Only if the only platform you care about is Windows.

Only if the only platform you care about is Windows.

Boy, you just couldn't resist the chance to do a little GPL/RMS bashing could you?

FYI: ffmpeg is mostly under the LGPL (and its optional GPLed parts can be left out using a compile option resulting in a binary thats only covered by the LGPL), thus dynamic linking is explicitly supported/allowed. Your rant is thus irrelevant here.

For the commercial distros, as the posters above us allude to, the issue with ffmpeg is the patent-encumbered codecs that it implements, not its software license. If they included it, they'd soon have, at the very least, MPEG-LA's lawyers knocking on their door...

Debian wasn't doing anything *wrong*, merely different, because Debian was never focused on being a noob-friendly desktop Linux.

From at least 3 years ago by your own admission. In 'Gentoo Years', thats a lifetime... :)

I use paludis, so I wouldn't know.

Actually, those 2 you mentioned, plus likely GNOME, are the *only* multi-hour compiles really left anymore, at least on modern desktops, and in any event, you can still use your computer to do almost anything else now too, thanks to that same modern hardware & a low-latency 2.6.xx kernel. Compiles on Gentoo are not nearly the big deal they were 6-8 years ago.

Finally, you don't even have to update just for minor version ticks, I sometimes mask the minor ones on big packages if I don't want to be bothered...

And if a compile fails, there is no rule that says you have to do *anything*. Just ignore it. Your current system still works, so give it a few days, or a week, or a *month*, and then see if the devs have fixed the problem in the new version. I've never really understood this particular complaint...

Portage has 'revdep-rebuild', and paludis has 'reconcilio' for this. Just run the tool after a major update to make sure nothing is broken (I automatically run reconcilio after a world update). Doesn't seem to actually occur much anymore for me, but when it does, its automatically fixed.

Aggregated annoyances are an inevitable consequence of size and complexity.

Ironically, it was Debian that I switched from, all those many moons ago, because of accumulated annoyances involving broken dependencies (I'm sure things are better now though).

The one nice thing about a source-based distro is that its harder for something to have broken, hard dependencies, because generally if you can build it, then you know it found all its deps (otherwise it wouldn't have built).

Not completely foolproof, of course, won't catch some optional deps that are only conditionally dlopened (however the tools mentioned above will find all of these), but then again, the last time I ever had a seriously hosed system due to broken deps was on Debian, not Gentoo...

Same here...

I haven't needed to do that in years.

Hell, I can still listen to music (amarok - no stuttering) & browse the web (firefox), read email/newsgroups, work on something in an IDE, or even play some game (don't have any heavy OpenGL ones though), even while recompiling *KDE* fer heaven's sake.

This particular Gentoo joke annoys me much, because it was rendered obsolete by modern hardware & the modern Linux 2.6.xx kernel (outstanding low latency), oh, 5-8 years ago, at least for desktops.

I'll relax when idiotic posts like the GP are modded down or just ignored instead of modded funny/insightful. How many jokes about other distros *routinely* get the same kind of insightful/funny treatment?

Gentoo jokes on /. is an obsessive-compulsive meme, where most of the people who make these posts and/or think they are funny/insightful haven't actually run Gentoo in years, if ever.

Now get the hell off my lawn...

Actually, the subsequent waves (starting ~30min after the first) fared no better in most places. It all depended on *where* you landed, whether between the German strongpoints (it was from these in-between points where the breakouts off the beach initially occurred), or directly in front of them (you were in for a very bad several hours - if you lived at all).

It was (VEI~=8), and there was actually another one (also VEI~=8) even more 'recent', at ~25,000 years ago, than Toba:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oruanui_eruption

Except releasing specs isn't the only thing they're doing. They've also got at least 3 of their own devs (AMD employees) working on the new driver stack. Once that new stack hits the mainstream, people's perceptions of AMD support for Linux are going to change dramatically (I'm using that new stack now).