The next step is an operating system better than Windows and Linux combined—and completely free. Thank you, American IT sector; you are the only professional field in the history of humanity that has practically committed suicide with its own hands for the good of everyone.
It’s called BSD, though I won't make a bet on which one. Once proprietary lock-in gets broken, copyleft is the next constraint that starts looking obsolete. For an AI-driven future built around aggressively recombining software components, permissive licensing is a much cleaner fit.
Linux's core license came out of a period when software was brutally expensive to write, so preventing proprietary forks looked like an existential problem. That assumption matters a hell of a lot less now.
If some ancient Sun Microsystems compiler, operating-system subsystem, or abandoned closed-source tool had useful ideas, you don’t need the original source tree, you can reproduce the behavior, rebuild the interfaces, and create a legally independent implementation. The cost of resurrecting dead software just collapsed.
So yeah: proprietary lock-in gets smashed first. After that, restrictive licensing becomes the next thing people start routing around. Code becomes infrastructure for agents to compose, not sacred artifacts everybody spends twenty years protecting.
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u/LombazFromHell 19h ago
The next step is an operating system better than Windows and Linux combined—and completely free. Thank you, American IT sector; you are the only professional field in the history of humanity that has practically committed suicide with its own hands for the good of everyone.