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> It is especially appealing as a non-linux opensource project with a BSD (non GPL) license that is fairly well maintained. The Non-GPL license means that a com
by AlexMax 13y ago
> It is especially appealing as a non-linux opensource project with a BSD (non GPL) license that is fairly well maintained. The Non-GPL license means that a company can use FreeBSD in a closed-source project.
How much of a one way street does this turn out to be for FreeBSD? I've always worried about BSD projects being left hung out to dry because companies have less of an obligation to contribute to the parent project compared to something like Linux, but I'd be interested to see how it works out in practice.
I do remember reading some depressing things about contributions to OpenSSH (a quick google search returns "OpenSSH has no wealthy sponsors, nor a business model. In fact, no Commercial Unix or Linux vendor has ever given our project a cent."), but perhaps FreeBSD is different in that aspect.
- profquail 13y agoThe FreeBSD Foundation does get some monetary support from both commercial users and end-users; some commercial FreeBSD users (e.g., Netflix, Juniper) have core developers on their payroll, so they indirectly contribute in that way instead. FreeBSD also benefits when companies release or contribute to other BSD-licensed, open-source projects, since that code can then be used within FreeBSD itself. Apple's (and Intel's) contributions to Clang/LLVM are a prime example; another is Apple's open-sourcing of launchd, the FreeBSD port of which was just relaunched (no pun intended): https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd But yes, as some GPL proponents will point out, there are companies who use FreeBSD for their commercial products without contributing back. In the end, they probably lose out as much as anyone though, due to the cost of paying developers to maintain a completely separate codebase.