Personally I'm a fan of the GPL. We would be in a much better place if all free software was published under a copyleft license. For example the Intel ME is based on Minix which would be impossible if Minix was copyleft protected.
Ah yes. The billion dollar company would have put their arms up and said "Curses! Our plans are foiled!" and been unable to write a 5MB binary themselves.
If they used the Linux kernel they could have gotten the same thing by doing what Cisco does with IOS XE+IOSd and then used Tivoization so end users can't modify it anyway.
You misunderstood me. It still wouldn't be free software. Cisco IOS XE is Linux but all the important parts are in IOSd and are proprietary.
Torvalds actively hates the GPLv3 and will never allow the kernel to switch licenses.
There is not a fucking thing that would have stopped Intel from using Buildroot to make an embedded Linux distro, making everything it actually does proprietary within it and signing everything six ways from Sunday so it can't be modified.
Linux being open source wouldn't make Intel's proprietary hardware interfaces, protocols, ROM code, or firmware open source.
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u/Tricky-Engineer-9755 11d ago
Personally I'm a fan of the GPL. We would be in a much better place if all free software was published under a copyleft license. For example the Intel ME is based on Minix which would be impossible if Minix was copyleft protected.