2 ms·
From what I heard, at least some companies that use FreeBSD in their products do give back and upstream at least bits of their code (like Sony, NetApp, ...). Pr
by dark-star 4y ago
From what I heard, at least some companies that use FreeBSD in their products do give back and upstream at least bits of their code (like Sony, NetApp, ...). Probably mostly improvements to existing kernel subsystems, maybe not drivers, if the hardware isn't freely available... but they still participate in development. At the end of the day, it is in their interest as it lessens the maintenance burden of forward-porting everything to every new kernel version.
- filmgirlcw 4y agoCorrect! And that’s sort of my point. But I don’t think a lot of those companies care about wifi drivers working on laptops, as an example. It is absolutely in their interest to help. But if people expect companies to just write a driver for X operating system, that’s not realistic. And if you could just port the Linux drivers, sure, that would be easier, but it wouldn’t change the fact that device makers still have the be able to prioritize where to put their resources. And laptop FreeBSD users is probably really low on most lists.
- nortonham 4y agonetflix definitely gives back to the freebsd project. They run their appliance that delivers netflix content on FreeBSD-current, the development branch