Not really. Linux won because the GPL has proven to be more suitable to businesses, and especially commercial open source business models as practiced by companies such as Cygnus and Red Hat.
BSD-style licenses tend to be a better fit for business models that sell proprietary extensions to free software. These form lock-in moats that inhibits the growth of any deeper ecosystems. We've seen this over and over again with things such as graphical subsystems for non-free UNIX, but also more recent examples with firewalls and storage boxes. Those are great for what they do, but work on the free parts are seen more like a gift to the community than a money maker.
The tit-for-tat model of the GPL enables those ecosystems to form. By forcing your competitors to free their code in exchange for yours, game theory dictates that moats cannot form, and when everyone stands on other's shoulders development is faster.
I'd say that's pretty much experimentally proven by now. Of course, reality is not as black and white, especially when GPL-style companies contribute to BSD-licensed software and vice versa. Perhaps PostgreSQL is a prominent example of that. There are however traces of these patterns there too, for example in how the many proprietary clustering solutions for the longest time kept the community from focusing on a standard way.
> Linux won because the GPL has proven to be more suitable to businesses, and especially commercial open source business models as practiced by companies such as Cygnus and Red Hat.
That's an interesting take, but I'm not sure I understand.
Are you saying Linux would've lost (presumably to proprietary OSs?) if it used a permissive license?
If the GPL has been proven to be more suitable for business, why is the use of GNU GPL licenses declining in favor of permissive licenses?
I don't have a hog in this pen and so I'm not trying to provoke. I'd just like to hear thoughts on why it looks so different from where I sit.
The size and quantity of companies working on things related to a project determines whether a strong copyleft license or a permissive license makes the project more successful
Say you want to make a business around a FOSS project. Which license should you choose for that project?
If your business starts gaining traction, people may realize it's a good business opportunity, and create companies that compete against you.
I'll simplify to two licenses, GPL and MIT. Then there's two options, based on which one you chose originally:
1) If you chose the GPL, then you can be sure that no competitor will get to use your code without allowing you to use theirs too. You can think of this as protection, ensuring no other company can make a product that's better than yours without starting from scratch. Because everyone is forced to publish their changes, your product will get better the more competition you have. However, your competitors will always be just a little behind you because you can't legally deny them access to the code.
2) OTOH if you chose MIT, a competitor can just take your project, make a proprietary improved version of it and drive you out of the market. The upside is if you get to be big enough, you can do exactly that to _your_ competitors.
You can see that when you are a small company the benefits of GPL outweigh the cons, but for big ones it's more convenient to use MIT or other permissive licenses. In fact, I think the answer to your question "why is the use of GNU GPL licenses declining?" is because tech companies tend to be bigger than before.
Now say you want to make a business around some already existing software. And say there's two alternative versions of that software, one under the GPL and one under the MIT license (for example, Linux and BSD). Which one should base your business on? And contribute to? Well, it's the same logic as before.
In the context of Linux, think of the GPL as a joint development agreement, with teeth.
I used to follow LLVM development. There was lots of mailing list traffic of the form "I'll send you guys a patch as soon as management approves it..." followed by crickets.
Basically, RMS was exactly correct about the impact that loadable modules would have on GCC's development.
> If the GPL has been proven to be more suitable for business, why is the use of GNU GPL licenses declining in favor of permissive licenses?
It isn't, at least not exactly. It's declining in favor of a combined permissive/commercial license model. And it's only doing that for products that are meant to be software components.
The typical model there is that you use a permissive license for your core product as a way of getting a foot in the door. Apache 2.0 is permissive enough that most businesses aren't going to be afraid that integrating your component poses any real strategic risk. GPL, on the other hand, is more worrisome - even if you're currently a SAAS product, a critical dependency on GPLv2 components could become problematic if you ever want to ship an on-prem product, and might also become a sticking point if you're trying to sell the company.
But it's really just a foot in the door. The free bits are typically enough to keep people happy just long enough to take a proper dependency on your product, but not sufficient to cover someone's long-term needs. Maybe it's not up to snuff on compliance. Or the physical management of the system is kind of a hassle. Something like that. That stuff, you supply as commercial components.
I don't agree, I think the license doesn't matters at all for users. And there really aren't that many companies distributing Linux, such that they would need to comply with the GPL. Google can make all the patches they want for their servers. The only reason for them to contribute them back is to offload the maintenance cost.
As with most things, I think Linux succeeded because it was a worse-is-better clone of existing systems that happened to get lucky.
BSD-style licenses tend to be a better fit for business models that sell proprietary extensions to free software. These form lock-in moats that inhibits the growth of any deeper ecosystems. We've seen this over and over again with things such as graphical subsystems for non-free UNIX, but also more recent examples with firewalls and storage boxes. Those are great for what they do, but work on the free parts are seen more like a gift to the community than a money maker.
The tit-for-tat model of the GPL enables those ecosystems to form. By forcing your competitors to free their code in exchange for yours, game theory dictates that moats cannot form, and when everyone stands on other's shoulders development is faster.
I'd say that's pretty much experimentally proven by now. Of course, reality is not as black and white, especially when GPL-style companies contribute to BSD-licensed software and vice versa. Perhaps PostgreSQL is a prominent example of that. There are however traces of these patterns there too, for example in how the many proprietary clustering solutions for the longest time kept the community from focusing on a standard way.