this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
249 points (94.3% liked)
Linux
59677 readers
769 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How does permissive licensing lead to corporate takeover? Companies can do proprietary forks of permissively licensed foss projects, but they can't automatically take over the upstream.
A company can throw so much manpower at the project that by adding more features and marketing the proprietary fork heavily (Extend) users start moving from the free fork to the proprietary one, and when the users are gone, the devs leave also. We end up with the original project dead(Extinguish).
I think that's a misunderstanding of how software works. More features != better. I'm aware that many users think that, but it's not a common view in the foss community. People in the foss community largely hate corporate enshittified bloated software and won't use a proprietary fork that some company has added an LLM to. A project doesn't need mainstream appeal; think about all the foss utilities written for Linux and BSDs where the target audience is "nerds"/enthusiasts/etc. These projects maintain themselves and their popularity just fine with a limited target audience. Besides, most foss isn't for the average computer user. There's a lot of foss that isn't user software (libraries and OS/kernelspace software), and then there's software like curl which can be for end users but is mostly used as a library, and the end users who use curl directly are a more technical crowd who most likely care about foss. The mainstream crowd that wants their iPhones and copilots are not making decisions between a foss option and a proprietary option.
Permissive licensing can create what is effectively "software tivoization" (the restriction or dirty interpretation of distribution and modification rights of software by the inclusion of differently-licensed components).
The Bitwarden case is a good example of how much damage can be done to a brand with merely the perception of restrictive licensing. obviously, bitwarden has clarified the mess, but not before it was being called 'proprietary' by the whole oss community.
So I don't think op is referring to direct corporate takeover, but damage caused by corporate abuse of a fork.