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What's preventing FreebBSD from modifying their license to say something like "the above license applies to all companies that had less than $150 billion cash o
by ilaksh 6y ago
What's preventing FreebBSD from modifying their license to say something like "the above license applies to all companies that had less than $150 billion cash on hand in the year 2020, and the following minimum donation requirements apply to other companies"?
They could say something like $2-$5 million minimum. Then sue the crap out of them when they try to get out of it.
- mlyle 6y agoApple has used the code as it was licensed when they used it, and you can't retroactively make the license more strict. You could license new FreeBSD code more strictly. And then Apple would decide whether it was worth $2-5M to get those new pieces of code. And you'd alienate the entire BSD crowd because of this strange license term.
- ilaksh 6y agoI did not suggest it would apply to the old code. I think the reasonable response would be to acknowledge just how large the cash reserve is compared to what is being asked. And not the ENTIRE BSD crowd. Because surely one or two of them would see the idea of getting a small amount from these extremely wealthy companies as being acceptable.
- sokoloff 6y agoAvoiding the appearance (and reality) of obvious bad faith, (even extortionate?), non-open source licensing terms probably.
- zamadatix 6y agoI'm sure for $2-$5 million per year Apple would rather just hire a few additional developers and never touch new FreeBSD source again than deal with those types of arrangements. As would a large portion of the developers and users - you don't pick BSD licensed projects because you liked restrictive licenses.
- ilaksh 6y agoNone of the individual users would need to worry because they did not have more than $150 billion in cash reserves in 2020.
- zamadatix 6y agoI said "you don't pick BSD licensed projects because you liked restrictive licenses" not "you don't pick BSD licensed projects because you're excluded from restrictions on the license personally". FreeBSD literally made it's own form of permissive license, it's not in the ideology of those that work on it to make that non-permissive. If it were they'd work on literally any Unix kernel but the one that forged permissive licenses back in the day.