Nobel Peace Prize to Linus Torvalds: A Northwest Nobel option?

[Darryl Moore]

Robert Brockway wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Nov 2009, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> 
>> That's certainly debateable.  Without Linus we would still be waiting
>> for the FSF to finish hurd (which might happen someday.  Maybe.)
> 
> Don't forget the BSDs.  Without Linus either one of the free BSDs would
> have taken its place as the most popular free OS, or a fork[1] of GNU
> would have started to use a BSD kernel.
> 
> [1] It would have to be a fork as the FSF would never accept this.

They could easily have forked BSD themselves to build Hurd, then
relicense it under the GPL. That's the sort of thing Apple did.

So yeah without Linus we wouldn't have Linux, but we would have
something licensed under the GPL amongst other licenses. Without RMS,
OSS would be a lot less mature for sure. There would be no GPL and no
GNU tools, amongst others.

Would netscape have been as thoughtful about contributing their code if
OSS wasn't as mature as it was at the time? Dunno, but it is possible.
Same with Solaris, and many other projects.

Without the FSF to adopt many OS projects and then enforce distribution
licenses, there would be a lot more corporate piracy of OSS, as many OS
developers would not have the means to protect their copyrights.
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