17 ms·
> Sure, they could, and as it turns out, that seems in > practice to make them more likely, not less, to not only > use but also contribute back to the permiss
by jra_samba 9y ago
> Sure, they could, and as it turns out, that seems in
> practice to make them more likely, not less, to not only
> use but also contribute back to the permissively licensed
> project.
This is a common argument from MIT/BSD/Permissive licensing folks, but there are many counterexamples.
NetApps entire OS is based on FreeBSD. There is no WAFL filesystem donated back to FreeBSD.
Isilon (now EMC/Dell) is based on FreeBSD. There is no OneFS distributed filesystem donated back to FreeBSD.
Apple MacOS is based on FreeBSD. There is no HFS+ filesystem donated back to FreeBSD.
There are many examples of corporations donating back to permissively licensed projects, but enough counterexamples (I use the storage space as that is what I'm most familiar with) that I don't think in general you can say that "in practice... it makes them more likely.. to contribute back."