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> I've worked for 5 years in a [small] company using FreeBSD as the main development platform, heavily hacking the TCP and network stack. We leached plenty, and
by tete 10y ago
> I've worked for 5 years in a [small] company using FreeBSD as the main development platform, heavily hacking the TCP and network stack. We leached plenty, and didn't contribute a single line back !
I wanna challenge that with my own experience. Some companies give back, others don't. I don't think it's based on license, but on company culture.
If you look at GPL and similar, what you find is that people:
- Modify for their own internal stuff, so they don't give anything back (happens with every tool)
- Modify and even publish binaries, not contributing back, acting against the license
- Modify it and release it in a way to comply with the license, but basically rendering it unusable and where it would be easier to just start from scratch
- Modify it and sometimes even release it in an obfuscated manner, sometimes with comments stripped, etc.
Now, doesn't prove you wrong. However the sentence starts with "The BSD License Means", which simply hasn't proven as true. Other examples of BSD license are: clang, Ruby, nginx, Go, node.js, OpenSSH, ...
Also this would largely apply to other licenses, such as MIT, zlib, etc. as well.
The main reason for releasing or not releasing is what the company thinks about it. Maybe they believe competition steals it, maybe they think it will lower maintenance needed for the patchset, maybe they care about broad support for their stuff, maybe they care for people finding and fixing bugs, maybe they wanna show off, etc.
Look at FreeBSD Release Notes and Commits. It's filled with companies working on it.
There is no doubt that many people don't contribute back, but from my limited personal experience the main factor is the company and I don't know a single case where it was the license deciding that.
You could also have your personal Linux patchset. If you just use it on your servers there is NOTHING forcing you to to contribute a single line back.