Lightweight

Yup. We have a new generation of devs now starting companies, and they've *always* had Free Software as a raw material. They didn't live through the rough transition from a fully proprietary world where Free and Open Source was treated with open contempt and actively put down by proprietary software vendors. They continue to think that businesses can be "friends" to the community. Some private companies, perhaps, but public corporations, no. This new generation of open source devs put their trust into public corporations like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, because they can't imagine how they could go rogue and close what was once open... This is similar to the conventional wisdom, held by many until very recently, that the US gov't was a benign champion of the citizens of the US and the values of the US' founders... FOSS is insurance for the user, to insure that they, too, can be the developer. It's forgotten by many up-and-coming devs who are "permissive" licensing fans. They forget that "permissive" depends on your perspective. Permissive for businesses, but not for users. I respectfully suggest they reconsider their underlying assumptions.

Scott - this is a pretty auspicious list, thanks for compiling it! Does a free and open source advocate's heart good to see it... I would, however, amend with the 4 reasons you provided for Linux's success (and 25 years of existence): yes, Linus is pragmatic, but his ideology is "the best technological solution wins". Also, he made another very powerful decision (possibly, somewhat ironically, pragmatically motivated): he adopted the GPLv2 for the kernel license. As I'm sure you know, this license protects not the interests of the developer, but those of the *user*. This is because it does not distinguish between the user and the developer like most other licenses do: it is designed with the assumption that a user *is* a developer (or can be if they desire). I believe that this *non-exploitatitive* license had subtle but profound effect on the willingness of individuals and businesses who needed a capable but malleable OS for their hardware devices (primarily)... The alternative open source licenses, that *businesses* call "permissive" (or, without irony, "more free") from *their perspective*, means the software released under them can be *exploited* for commercial to the detriment of users. The most obvious example is the BSD license under which other free UNIX implementations (the *BSD family) that predate Linux were released. These have been nowhere near as successful or widely adopted as Linux (despite, arguably, having some design and implementation advantages). I argue their relative obscurity is due to the fact that commercial entities can use/incorporate their code with the only condition of maintaining the copyright/license notice *in the source code*. Those businesses can then sell the resulting software, as *proprietary* software, back to the market, including its original developers! For example, that's how the Microsoft Corporation famously caught up to the Internet era by taking the BSD TCP/IP stack and building it into early versions of Windows, like Win95. Similarly, Apple used the BSD licensed "Mach32" kernel as the basis for their OS X system, renaming it Darwin... They did keep the kernel mostly open source, but the kept most of the valuable user-interface level aspects proprietary, which is why Darwin never caught on anywhere other than in Apple products.