My apologies if this is the wrong place to ask this.
I've been reading around online about keeping software secure, and I've been puzzled by something for a while now. I'm not sure if this is a stupid question or not.
Generally, when I see online conversation about Linux vulnerabilities, I often see people detailing the how big the attack surface of the Linux kernel itself is due to its' monolithic kernel; I saw a blog post about this very thing linked somewhere here on Lemmy recently. I also see folks glamoring about how the BSD 'spinoffs' (?) all have much better fundamental approaches to security, and they get compared to Linux quite often as 'the superior platform' due to things like the non-monolithic kernel and BSD Jails. Hell, one of the main self-touted benefits of the BSDs is that there is significant effort placed on discovering vulnerabilities.
Could someone knowledgeable tell me why desktop Linux has seemed to be 'chosen' in comparison to something like FreeBSD or OpenBSD? I don't see any open-source forks of a BSD spinoff (only proprietary ones like what runs on the PS5), nor do I see anyone talking about using them for desktop computing purposes. Is there a fundamental challenge too great to overcome right now with using something like FreeBSD as a desktop OS, or has there simply not been enough volunteer manpower to throw at it, and Linux already has that problem, in comparison, solved? It shocks me that the adoption is so low, especially considering the reportedly amazing binary compatibility with most existing Linux software.
The FreeBSD desktop exists, it is called "Mac OS".
Linus Torvalds used the GPL for his kernel, forcing companies to release the source code if they improve it and distribute it. The main userland was a lot of GPL licensed GNU software for a very long time, with a similar effect.
The BSD folks, on the other hand, decided to give everything away, by using much more "liberal" licenses. Apple took the BSD base, bolted their UI on top of it and gave almost nothing back. That would not have happened if BSD was GPL licensed.
macOS is very much not BSD. It’s its own weird (as in rare, not as in bad) thing that happens to ship a CLI BSD compatibility layer
For example, you can read on the independent and somewhat distinct design of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU the kernel, which they open sourced anyways despite the lack of copyleft elements
Edit: I am a staunch supporter of FSF and copyleft over permissive but what you’re saying is just wrong. apple is scummy just like the other big tech companies but it’s one of the least scummy out there, especially wrt open source. The biggest examples are WebKit and LLVM.
Oh shoot. Is that what's happening with the MIT licence on projects like the Rust coreutils?
Yes and no. It would be an issue if the coreutils were actually something difficult to do, but the main difficulty that project is encountering is just keeping bug-accurate compatibility. The fact they actually managed to get something working in a couple months is the indicator that it is not really that gamechanging.
Now a kernel or a browser on the other hand are another beast.
Does this mean they had to implement bugs from the GNU versions as compatibility features? Do you have a source for that? I'd be interested to read what kinds of things that entails.
Maddening that Canonical pushed sudo-rs through in its current state
Well, technically the open source kernel behind all Apple's OSs is still (mostly) open source. It's useless as is, but it exists. So yay for BSD licences, I guess?