21 sats \ 13 replies \ @nullama 31 Oct \ on: Stacker Saloon
Open Source has changed the world in the last few decades.
It's crazy to think that one person can change the world by themselves by simply publishing source code that solves a problem.
Most people, all around the world, use many open source libraries and programs every day that are written and maintained by a handful of people, most of them are not even paid, and the software is extremely useful.
On the other hand, we have millions of people creating code on top of this, which is not that great, but end up receiving a lot of money.
Crazy world we live in.
I really enjoy reading about the origins. The Genesis Book describes the early days of FOSS. I'm sure you know all about the history, but for those who don't, this is a great read:
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Fantastic book!
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I like that OpenBSD, because it is based in Canada, can freely export cryptographic functionality, because any of the US export laws don't apply to it.
Why do we ship cryptography?In three words: because we can.The OpenBSD project is based in Canada.The Export Control List of Canada places no significant restriction on the export of cryptographic software, and is even more explicit about the free export of freely-available cryptographic software. Marc Plumb has done some research to test the cryptographic laws.Hence the OpenBSD project has embedded cryptography into numerous places in the operating system. We require that the cryptographic software we use be freely available and with good licenses. We do not directly use cryptography with nasty patents. We also require that such software is from countries with useful export licenses because we do not wish to break the laws of any country.OpenBSD was the first operating system to ship with an IPsec stack. We've been including IPsec since the OpenBSD 2.1 release in 1997.
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TL;DR: One initial OS, Unix, inspired the creation of two similar, but different OS, OpenBSD, and Linux. You can even see them in action today (Android is based on Linux, and iOS on BSD)
Once upon a time, the company Bell Labs was using an OS called Unix, which was written by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and others.
Origin story of OpenBSD:
In the 1970s, the parent company, AT&T, started to share the source code of this OS to other companies and universities that were interested in it. One of them was the University of California at Berkeley, whom continued the development of it and made it more publicly available, in what would be known as the Berkley Software Distribution, or BSD. There's some drama following, but one branch of BSD ended up as OpenBSD currently, based on the last available BSD source code.
Now the origin story of Linux:
Bell Labs eventually started to sell Unix as a proprietary OS. Richard Stallman didn't like that the software of Unix was closed, so in 1983 he started a project to create a Unix-like OS but completely open source, called GNU.
Stallman and others continued to work on GNU, but weren't able to complete a kernel for it (the core of the OS).
In 1991, Linus Torvalds created a kernel that basically completed the GNU project. Most people call this OS Linux, and of course Richard Stallman calls it GNU/Linux.
Also, does it matter that you like OpenBSD if the world uses Linux?
The world uses both really. Most servers run Linux, Android is also based on Linux, but many systems that are used worldwide are based on BSD. For example the OS for PlayStation and Apple (macOS, iOS) are both based on FreeBSD.
So, thanks to University of Berkeley, and Richard Stallman (and many others), we have an incredible world of software today.
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The world uses both really. Most servers run Linux, Android is also based on Linux, but many systems that are used worldwide are based on BSD. For example the OS for PlayStation and Apple (macOS, iOS) are both based on FreeBSD.
Why do you think these companies chose the OS that they did?
Do you see Linux losing market share if countries are prevented from contributing to it?
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Why do you think these companies chose the OS that they did?
It's complex really, but one big difference is the license used.
With a BSD license you can keep your code closed, that's why iOS is closed source for example.
Linux uses GPL, which means the source code should be available, which you can get from AOSP: https://source.android.com Android derivatives like GrapheneOS use AOSP as their base for example.
Do you see Linux losing market share if countries are prevented from contributing to it?
There's no prevention of contributing to it. What I mentioned was the specific laws in the US about export of cryptography. You can't export certain types of software from the US to, say, Iran, or Cuba, etc. But those laws don't apply if the software originates from say, Canada, which is the case of OpenBSD.
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There's no prevention of contributing to it.
Sure there is.
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Linus is the main maintainer of the Linux kernel, and sure, he gets to decide what code goes there. But there's no law against it. Anyone can fork the kernel and make their own changes. Companies do it all the time.