Open Source Computing

Week of Feb 10

Week 5:

Licensing

Monday:

Linux is Obsolete -- Andy Tanenbaum

SFA and GPL violations (immediately following Vizio)

Functional license

Wednesday

Calculator

Open Source as a business

    "Open Core"

Linux history

What made Linux such a successful open-source project? Why did Linux beat BSD?
The email from Linus Torvalds to Mauro Carvalho illustrates two things:
  1. Torvalds' somewhat abusive style
  2. Torvalds' firm no-regression policy: user code that used to work should never be broken by a kernel update.

How do these factors play out in the success of Linux?

A third factor is Torvalds' policy on contributions: all are welcome, but they start out as non-mainline extensions, patches or modules.

386BSD

LibreOffice, bash