You are wrong. I doubt I will change your mind.

1. There are many, many, many more companies using Linux without giving back than there are for BSD. And not just “using it” either. Practically the entire embedded universe is one giant GPL violation.

2. Linux is not “true” GPL anyway, so it is a poor example for how the GPL impacts success.

3. The companies that build businesses on FreeBSD tend to give back. There are many examples, the biggest being Netflix.

4. The classic example of a company not giving back is Sony and even that is wrong.

5. People choosing a BSD license value different things, rendering your entire premise meaningless for them and your framing of “the problem” inappropriate.

I do not want to get too deep into Sony. But let’s acknowledge that they first tried to ship Linux on PlayStation. They had to stop. Why? Well, it was not because people tried to copy the operating system. It was because people used it to circumvent other protections to copy proprietary games. The problem was not with Sony’s ethics but with those of “the community” and the lack of respect “the community” had for the concept of copyright.

So, Sony switched to a FreeBSD base and they no longer share that code. True.

However, Sony does contribute to BSD. And Sony is a significant contributor to Clang/LLVM and they do share their work freely (even though the license does not require them to). The FreeBSD project benefits from this as Clang is the system compiler. I benefit from this as my Linux distro also uses Clang as the system compiler.

The BSD license is “free software” and provides all “4 freedoms” touted by the FSF. It protects your rights with regards to the code you have and are using. It does not give you guaranteed access to FUTURE code that you do not write. Those future contributors are free to choose their license. You know…freedom.

BSD lags in features, particularly hardware support, because it has fewer users and therefore fewer developers. That is mostly an accident of history and not, in my view, due in any way to the license. Look up the BSD lawsuit that was happening when Linux appeared. If your argument for the popularity of Linux is the GPL, why did Xorg become the dominant window system instead of something GPL based? Why did Rust, Swift, and Zig appear on LLVM instead of GCC?

Anyway, I could write 100 paragraphs and not change your mind. You certainly have not changed mine.

Yes, the big feature seems to be their package manager. But just because an update succeeds does not mean it did not break anything.

They also have their own boot manager and they seem to be fans of Rust, which explains the COSMIC desktop option. They have their own build system.

It is not clear to me that they are doing anything novel beyond that.

They do not have centralized configuration as far as I am aware so they do not go as far as Nix. As a Chimera Linux user, the atomic updates and bespoke build system feel like things I already have.

Overall it sounds like a nice project. But the improvements seem more incremental than revolutionary.

The Fedora Project was created by Red Hat explicitly to be a community distribution so that they could focus on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as an explicitly commercial dostribution.

Before Fedora, there was Red Hat Linux (not RHEL). Red Hat Linux was commercial but inexpensive. I remember it being around $50 but that could be wrong.

Red Hat made installing Linux easy back when it was not. They created the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM). They bundled configuration utilities and a commercial X server back when XFree86 was less great and had far worse hardware support.

As Red Hat Linux became more successful, there was increased tension between the “free software” community and Red Hat’s commercial ambitions.

An individual Red Hat user created something call “Fedora Linux” which was a repository of software for Red Hat Linux that Red Hat did not ship (it was not a full distro). Very soon after this, Red Hat announced the creation of the “Fedora Project” as a collaboration with “Fedora Linux” (the original Fedora Linux project was absorbed into the Fedora Project). The Fedora Project shipped a full Linux distribution called “Fedora Core” which was Red Hat Linux with the third-party commercial software removed. On top of the “Core”, the Fedora Project shipped the packages that Fedora Linux had been shipping. After a few releases, Fedora dropped “Core” from the name and we have Fedora Linux again (but as a full distro now).

Fedora was defined as a purely community distribution with a mandate to ship only Open Source software and to exclude anything commercial. Red Hat provided infrastructure and paid Red Hat employees to staff key positions in the project.

The original Red Hat Linux was discontinued, leaving Fedora as an explicitly community distro and RHEL as an explicitly commercial one. RHEL was slow moving and conservative. Fedora was faster paced and innovative. Tech that would later appear in RHEL would appear in Fedora first, often funded by Red Hat or built by Red Hat engineers. This was before CentOS even existed and it continues to this day.

Red Hat has already “taken over” Fedora. They created it. They still largely run it (staff it). But it is critical to their strategy that Fedora be a fully free software “community” distro. That is the whole reason it exists. So the idea that Red Hat will “take Fedora corporate” or “make it closed source” is completely ignorant of the history of the project.

If Red Hat did not find Fedora useful in its current form, they would simply abandon it. They would stop paying employees to work on it.

In the years since the creation of Fedora, the CentOS project was founded. CentOS was originally a “clone” of RHEL. It was compiled from the same sources as RHEL. It was “downstream” of RHEL. It was not created by Red Hat. It was a problem for Red Hat as RHEL was meant to be an explicitly commercial offering.

Red Hat took over the CentOS project. And they completely changed how it worked. They release “CentOS Stream” as an entirely new distribution. It is “upstream” of RHEL. That is, instead of CentOS being created from RHEL (and being essentially identical to it), RHEL is now created from CentOS. This means that CentOS is actually more of a community distro (for example AlmaLinux participates its evolution) but CentOS is no longer bit-for-bit compatible with RHEL.

I bring up CentOS as I see it as instructive for Fedora. Red Hat wants it to be LESS identical to their corporate offering.

The ethics of the MIT era referenced in the article are encoded in the MIT license. The ideals are those of Open Source: that software is best developed collaboratively.

RMS believe cares less about developers and more about users. The 4 freedoms talk about the ability to inspect and improve the source code but permissive licenses allow that as well. What makes the GPL unique are the rights it gives to users that are not writing the code. The GPL guarantees that users will get all the code developers write in the future, even if they have not contributed any themselves.

How is it unenforceable?

Real question

If you are a registered entity (even non-profit), you can be fined millions of dollars.

It is a very dumb law.

They need to do what Midnight BSD did, exclude California residents from the license.

Agreed. The need for Flatpak goes way down in a distro with access to the AUR.

I use Flatpak for pgAdmin because the Arch packages are terrible. But it is the only one.

He is doing the same kind of rewrite that the Ladybird founder did recently. They are just reacting differently to how well it is going.

Monoculture is bad for everything.

For one thing, it protects you when your BDFL loses their mind completely.

It IS the early days of GNOME. MATE started with the source code of the last GNOME 2 release.

MATE exists because people loved GNOME 2 and hated GNOME 3.

You do not need to understand anything about X11 vs Wayland. Use whatever your distro of choice defaults to.

Wayland is the future. Every Linux desktop user not fighting hard to avoid it will be using Wayland in 2 years. The majority are already.

Wayland and X11 are both protocols. They are a way for graphical applications to talk to a “display server” (your graphical desktop).

X11 was invented in the 80’s. Until recently, there was essentially only one surviving implementation on Linux—something called Xorg. While Xorg was the display server, you had to add something called a “window manager” to control what your desktop would look like and how windows would behave.

While Wayland essentially does the same thing as X11, it was built to quite a different set of design criteria. If you have not been part of the history, it is not worth knowing about. Security is one of the big improvements.

Perhaps the only detail worth mentioning is that the display server and window manager functions have been combined in Wayland into something called a “compositor”. So while everybody was using Xorg back in the X11 days, there are many competing compositor implementations in Wayland. They differ not just in how they manage windows but also in how them implement many other details like how to take screenshots, manage multiple monitors, or handle scaling. There are a set of standards that define this behaviour. It is a bit like the web where you have different web browsers and web servers but the same web applications work on all of turn (which perhaps some small differences).

The two systems both “do the same thing” and are quite different at the same time. If you use one, switching to the other may seem painful as things that worked may not anymore and even things that still work may be done differently or require quite different knowledge. Not many people switch from Wayland to X11 but anybody that used Linux 5 years ago has had to switch from X11 to Wayland (or feel pressured to). Not all of them are happy about it. Some of them rely on workflows that Wayland does not yet or many never support. These people consider the switch to Wayland a really big deal which is why you hear about it so much.

But, if you already use Wayland, ignore it. Everybody will stop talking about it soon as almost everybody has switched. The majority that have not switched are using popular desktops like Cinnamon or XFCE that have also not switched. They have not switched as they want to make the transition very seem-less for their users. Which also means you do not have to think about it. One day they will move you and hopefully you will not notice. Or, even better, it will seem like a bunch of new features in a new release.

That amount of money is one developer full time maybe. Which can make a really, really big difference for an Open Source project actually.

I hope they do not take their foot too far off the gas before completing their Wayland transition.

Once KDE, GNOME, COSMIC, Budgie, and Cinnamon are all Wayland, 90% of all Linux desktops will be Wayland. With XFCE, it could be 95%.

I am looking forward to essentially all Linux desktop users being on Wayland so we can stop acting like it is not already the norm or even pretending that it is not going to happen. I am looking forward to putting it behind us and we are so close.

At the same time, I have a lot of respect for conservative desktops like Cinnamon and XFCE that, while acknowledging that Wayland is the future, are taking great pains to minimize disruption for their current users and even to allow users to keep X11 as a fully supported platform. I am all for that.

I do not expect Cinnamon to maintain X11 as an option very long after they switch to Wayland as the default. First while many distros ship Cinnamon, it is really a product of the Mint project and Mint is very much a Linux Desktop. Second, Mint does not have the resources as they point out in this article. Of course, I could be wrong.

XFCE will probably keep X11 around much longer. First, XFCE is very popular in non-Linux settings. But mostly I say this because xfwm4 itself takes very little dev effort and it is the only XFCE component really tied to x11. Xorg is essentially in features freeze. As long as XLibre does not break everything, xfwm4 will just continue to work. The other components of XFCE work fine in both environments already. The goal of xfwl4 (the XFCE Wayland compositor) is to mirror the xfwm4 experience. And xfwl4 is deferring to other components to define behaviour (eg. xfsession and xfdesktop). So, it should be easy to keep the overall XFCE experience in sync on both display servers without much wasted effort.

I have well over a dozen Linux machines running in my home. More than half of them would be considered garbage by most people. Clearly, I disagree.

I have never had a problem with LMDE. My mother has been using it for about a year now. I used to have to come solve Windows problems for her a couple times a year but she had never asked me for any help with LMDE.

Cinnamon is not a “fork” of GNOME. MATE is a fork of GNOME as MATE started from GNOME source code.

Cinnamon was a reaction to GNOME 3. But Cinnamon was written from scratch to reflect a more traditional desktop metaphor. It was not created from existing GNOME code.

In the days of GTK 3, Cinnamon shipped quite a few of the default GNOME apps. Later, when GTK4/ libadwaita appeared, Cinnamon stayed with GTK3 and formed the XApps project which did fork many GNOME apps to stay on GTK3. XApps was meant to be a cross-desktop project serving all the GTK desktop environments.

These days, Cinnamon is trying to fork libadwaita to make GTK4 apps look better on their desktop.

In general, Cinnamon is fairly conservative. They are the last major desktop environment to default to X11 for example (though you will disagree with that view if you count XFCE as one of the major DEs).

There is no continent called America.

However, there is a country that hundreds of millions of people identify as “America”.

Be smarter.

I am from BC. Sure not every Canadian is like that but this person totally exists.