4 ms·

There is indeed a significant difference between the two - people paying for RHEL get support in return for their money. BSD benefactors get a good feeling and

There is indeed a significant difference between the two - people paying for RHEL get support in return for their money. BSD benefactors get a good feeling and a word of thanks for their contribution. The difference in the amounts of money received by both institutions shows how much are people willing to pay for the former vs. the latter.

antonovka2 17y ago
Colin's statement was in the context of the question of BSD vs. GPL licensing. RedHat's model it's clearly more effective than simple charity, but I don't see a difference between RedHat and any other OSS-reliant contributing vendor. As an example, Juniper funds FreeBSD development based on sales/support of their high-end networking products, and contributed the MIPS port included in FreeBSD 8: http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/news/article.php/3851031/Juniper-Backs-FreeBSD-With-MIPS-Port.htm http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/news/article.php/3... Blue Coat contributed the new L2/L3 SMP-improved rewrite: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3835746 http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3835746 The main difference is that these companies make their money by incorporating FreeBSD into their products, are not required to provide all the source to their products, and thus can contribute back improvements as they see fit.