On Sunday, 30 January 2022, at 10:00 PM, ron minnich wrote:

That happened about 10 years earlier. The effort I am talking about with jmk was 2013; the dustup with Theo was circa 2003:

Thanks for sharing those facts.

On Saturday, 29 January 2022, at 3:26 PM, David Leimbach wrote:

I haven’t ever heard the compiler tool chain was a big reason, but I’d be interested to hear your perspective here. GCC can produce code of any license.

Until the BSD systems switched to llvm even the most basic installment was depending on gcc. The integrated system compiler was gpl'ed and on a unix system where the c compiler was the most important tool to achive portability this did never seem right.

On Tuesday, 1 February 2022, at 3:12 PM, Dan Cross wrote:

This isn't really on-topic for 9fans, but I find this hard to believe. Linux used the exact same compiler suite, and became wildly successful while the BSD distributions mostly stagnated; certainly, the BSDs never grew at the rate or reached the levels of popularity that Linux has attained: it wasn't the license on the toolchain.

Berkeley stopped their distribution of BSD systems right after they were forced to remove the toolchain. The last releases were 4.3 and 4.4 lite. Then the project got forked. It led to a stop in development. I personally believe that this was the main reason behind the BSD's to lose their charm. If you read about the reasoning why as an example Minix or even plan9 got their own toolchains I think you can read between the lines that the lack or the existence of a toolchain with the right license is far more important than many believe.

Of course this is only my personal opinion and probably I'm misinterpreting things.