What the GNU folks brought to the table is the GPL. It negates the incentive to make proprietary forks. The thriving ecosystem in which Canonical, Red Hat, IBM, among others thrive would not be possible without it.
> The GPL has ultimately done more harm than good for open source
citation needed
> Sure they don't have to give back
And that's probably why *BSD is such a rich ecosystem when compared to Linux distros.
> if product X will never be opensource, at least it will be built with good wheels.
I would prefer not creating such incentive to proprietary software. As a user, I value my rights more than I, as a programmer, value my power to restrict my users' rights.
What the GNU folks brought to the table is the GPL. It negates the incentive to make proprietary forks. The thriving ecosystem in which Canonical, Red Hat, IBM, among others thrive would not be possible without it.
> The GPL has ultimately done more harm than good for open source
citation needed
> Sure they don't have to give back
And that's probably why *BSD is such a rich ecosystem when compared to Linux distros.
> if product X will never be opensource, at least it will be built with good wheels.
I would prefer not creating such incentive to proprietary software. As a user, I value my rights more than I, as a programmer, value my power to restrict my users' rights.