thelinuxlink.net

This article and writer just annoyed the hell out of me.

http://www.hitechsquad.com/2008/09/04/w ... e2%80%99t/

The answer can be summed up in two words: license and hero. In this case the license is the GPL and the hero is Linus Torvalds

How he gets from crediting Linux's success to the GPL license (which I completely agree with) to making the hero Linus Torvalds made my head spin. Stallman is the creator of the GPL and inventor of the concept of copyleft. Stallman and the GPL is why Linux won out. Of course there is not one mention of Richard Stallman in the piece.

There's an element that the author (Who apparently is terminally confused about what "public domain" means) either doesn't know about, or doesn't mention, and that is the famous USL vs. Berkeley lawsuit of the early nineties. In this, AT&T sued Berkeley for distributing BSD under the BSD license, they saw BSD as a derivative work of UNIX, even though BSD didn't really contain any UNIX code. At the time of that lawsuit (Which created a lot of fear around BSD, and whether it was safe or not) Linux appeared and with no legal issues to be spoken of, stormed through the free software community and just took off, while the details of the lawsuit were still being worked out. It ended when Novell bought UNIX System Labs from AT&T, the court concluded that BSD belonged to UC Berkeley and it could distribute it if it wanted to, and that they just had to change a few files to be fully in the clear. Not long after the last version of BSD from UC Berkeley was released and CSRG (Computer Systems Research Group) was disbanded.