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Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code

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Re: Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code

#71

Post by vacuity »

surajrmal wrote: post #64
imiric wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but if someone takes the free food and builds a business by selling it to others, without giving anything back to the original places, it harms everyone other than the person doing that. F/LOSS is not a charity or a gift, so your analogy is not appropriate. It is a social movement and philosophy with the goal of sharing knowledge and building software for the benefit of everyone . It invites collaboration, and fo…

This feels eerily close to having someone try to convince me to be join their religion. You don't need to force your opinions into others. Let them choose. If folks agree then the license will hold them back in terms of building a community. There are plenty of great open source kernels that don't use GPL, including freebsd. I think most embedded os kernels are not gpl (zephyr, freertos, etc). I would argue that Linu…

Just as people who strongly prefer permissive licenses deny copyleft licenses, this is the same in reverse. If you don't want to touch GPL projects, then don't.

Re: Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code

#73

Post by leo_e »

KerrAvon wrote: post #70
leo_e wrote: post #65

The choice of MIT for a kernel feels like setting up the project to be cannibalized rather than contributed to. We've seen this movie before with the BSDs. Hardware vendors love permissive licenses because they can fork, add their proprietary HAL/drivers, and ship a closed binary blob without ever upstreaming a single fix. Linux won specifically because the GPL forced the "greedy" actors to collaborate. In the embedd…

Not meaning to single you out specifically, but this entire discussion — all of this license gatekeeping is ridiculous. This is a very cool project, but if the license ruins it for you, there are zillions of open source GPL3 kernels. I mean, this is not different from bitching about someone writing their custom kernel in C++ instead of Rust, or Zig. It’s not your project! Let people do their own thing! MIT is a perfe…

That’s the truth

Re: Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code

#76

Post by dejung »

KerrAvon wrote: post #70
leo_e wrote: post #65

The choice of MIT for a kernel feels like setting up the project to be cannibalized rather than contributed to. We've seen this movie before with the BSDs. Hardware vendors love permissive licenses because they can fork, add their proprietary HAL/drivers, and ship a closed binary blob without ever upstreaming a single fix. Linux won specifically because the GPL forced the "greedy" actors to collaborate. In the embedd…

Not meaning to single you out specifically, but this entire discussion — all of this license gatekeeping is ridiculous. This is a very cool project, but if the license ruins it for you, there are zillions of open source GPL3 kernels. I mean, this is not different from bitching about someone writing their custom kernel in C++ instead of Rust, or Zig. It’s not your project! Let people do their own thing! MIT is a perfe…

Why is a proven effect "ridiculous" to discuss? It's a valid concern and the discussion could make the authors rethink their choice.

Re: Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code

#80

Post by LeFantome »

leo_e wrote: post #65

The choice of MIT for a kernel feels like setting up the project to be cannibalized rather than contributed to. We've seen this movie before with the BSDs. Hardware vendors love permissive licenses because they can fork, add their proprietary HAL/drivers, and ship a closed binary blob without ever upstreaming a single fix. Linux won specifically because the GPL forced the "greedy" actors to collaborate. In the embedd…

Not sure why am getting in the middle of this but I need to point out that you are not even correct for Linux.

Linux rather famously has avoided the GPL3 and is distributed under a modified GPL2. This license allows binary blob modules. We are all very familiar with this.

As a result, the kernel that matches your description above that ships in the highest volume is Linux by a massive margin. Can you run a fully open source Linux kernel on your Android phone? Probably not. You do not have the drivers. You may not pass the security checks.

Do companies like Broadcomm “collaborate” on Linux even in the PC or Mac space? Not really.

On the other side, companies that use FreeBSD do actually contribute a lot of code. This includes Netflix most famously but even Sony gives back.

The vast majority of vendors that use Linux embedded never contribute a single line of code (like 80% or more at least - maybe 98%). Very few of them even make the kernel code they use available. I worked in video surveillance where every video recorder and camera in the entire industry is Linux based at this point. Almost none of them distribute source code.

But even the story behind the GPL or not is wrong in the real world.

You get great industry players like Valve that contribute a lot of code. And guess what, a lot of that code is licensed permissively. And a lot of other companies continue to Mesa, Wayland, Xorg, pipewire, and other parts of the stack that are permissively licensed. The level of contribution has nothing to do with the GPL.

How about other important projects? There are more big companies contributing to LLVM/Clang (permissive) than there are to GCC (GPL).

In fact, the GPL often discourages collaboration. Apple is a great example of a company that will not contribute to even the GPL projects that they rely on. But they do contribute a fair bit of Open Source code permisssively. And they are not even one of the “good guys” in Open Source.

This comment is pure ideological mythology.

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