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The upshot of the BSD-license in the case of FreeBSD is that it has found it and its components used in many commercial products, including MacOS/OS X, the PlayStation’s Orbis OS, and of course the BSD networking stack is happily used in Windows, macOS and just about anywhere else. Meanwhile the GPL forced Linksys to open the firmware to its WRT54G series of routers, ultimately leading to the development of OpenWrt and similar projects.
They make it sound like the *WRTs were the worst thing to happen to consumer networking and that corporations not being required to contribute back to projects has made BSD stronger, rather than given companies free labor. I find the *BSDs to be pretty interesting, but let’s not pretend that they’re benefiting from companies using their work. Very shilly tone to this article.
WRT54G were the best shit back then. So much choice with firmware, loved the Tomato firmware and its flexible QoS. Good times.
Of the ones listed, Apple and Sony have definitely contributed back to FreeBSD. Apple hired the lead LLVM dev and paid him to keep working on it. Sony has paid for LLVM development in particular, but also development of other parts of FreeBSD. Source on the Sony bit, which also mentions that for example Netflix is an even bigger contributor
There’s plenty of benefit in contributing back to permissive projects you use, because you have less maintenance overhead if the diff between your fork and the upstream source is smaller.
WRT was the only reason some of those routers were even usable.
let’s not pretend that they’re benefiting from companies using their work.
Of course they are. Sony, Netflix and the like are major contributors to the project.
So this sounds like a bad thing then…
Like if having gpl code in free bsd forced all these companies to be more open with their software, and now they can be more closed with it, isn’t that bad?
It’s more of a symbolic thing. FreeBSD has removed the vast majority of gpl code over the last decades. I think this specific removal was just a last lingering overlap that was difficult to replace.
Is it bad? It’s subjective. The project goals were always to be permissive. There was just historical borrowing from other open source projects.
I think both approaches are valid. GPL has fostered a greater number of maintainers and volunteer participants. That’s definitely its shown strength but you can also attribute fragmentation to this. Whereas BSD has created much more focused and targeted distributions. I guess that’s indirectly due to the license and more the smaller group of active contributors.
It’s really difficult to rival FreeBSD at certain specific usecases. I wouldn’t use anything else for a NAS or a router.
It’s a very lopsided distro, bad gpu and wifi support. Limited application support. Really not ideal for a desktop, nor is it really meant to be used that way.
It allows freebsd to be true to the BSD license, and I agree with the author that it makes licensing easier. BSD will always be free and incredibly permissive, and I don’t see this changing anything. But a lot of the strides that linux has made is because people need to release their changes.
BSD on the other hand doesn’t require giving back, so you get Apple that was the largest company in the world building off of the work of FreeBSD. I certainly don’t see FreeBSD being comparable to macOS like Fedora is to RHEL. It’s more like Apple took what they wanted and walked away.
It’s a mixed bag.
The major companies that use it, contribute back to it (think Netflix, Sony, Apple, etc). If they didn’t have a copyleft option, Sony and Apple would’ve built completely closed-source and wouldn’t be contributing to anything. Netflix is different in that GPL wouldn’t force them to disclose their modifications, they just preferred FreeBSD because of its networking stack, they would’ve probably just gone with Linux if FreeBSD didn’t exist.
Yes, it’s bad. Permissive licensing (instead of copyleft) is for cucks.
You are very shrilly yourself. Plenty of companies have shown it isn’t hard to take GPL without contributed back. There are high odds you are using a chrome based browser to read this - did you know that is a GPL project because once upon a time it was khtml (from the KDE project), but the changes were never contributed back. Many embedded companies have their own fork of linux as well - their changes are all available as the GPL requires, but the changes won’t be accepted to the kernel as is and so the fact that they are available is useless.
Meanwhile there are many companies using FreeBSD who choose to contribute their changes back, just like some companies choose to contribute back to various GPL projects they use.
So your argument is that because there are some exceptions to a rule, the opposite of that rule is true.
Basically his argument is that because some companies choose to contribute back to BSD projects even though they aren’t required to, and because some GPL projects choose not to merge some changes from downstream forks, the GPL and BSD licenses are effectively the same. I think the flaw in this logic should be pretty apparent. I think the GPLv2 vs. GPLv3 debate is a lot more interesting, particularly since Linus has come out against GPLv3.
Another way to phrase that is that companies can choose to meaningulfully contribute back, or not, with either project, and there are plenty of examples of each combination.
No, you have failed to understand how either license works. Companies are forced to contribute back in the case of the GPL and the project can choose to accept that or not. In the case of the BSD license companies can choose whether to contribute back and if they do, then the project has the option to accept it or not. The GPL makes it always the choice of the project, while the BSD makes it always the choice of the company.
You have failed to understand the difference between idealism and practice. There are more companies that use Linux without ever contributing back than those that do. Those that do do so because it makes practical business sense to improve the upstream project they rely on. Any company that has decided they don’t want to share some code just builds it in a binary module, firmware, or application to sit on top.
I thought Microsoft pulled or rewrote the tcp/ip stack a while ago?
Windows have always had a shitty different net stack, if it’s based on BSD it’s truly amazing how they took a perfect thing and broke it.
Seeing where BSDs are today vs Linux/GNU I would say history made it clear already.
Capitalism will 100% use and give zero every single time when permitted.
Lol I read Linus’ release notes for Linux .01 (linked in the article) and I really liked this part listed under the hardware requirements
Finnish keyboard (oh, you can use a US keyboard, but not without some practise :-)
The Finnish keyboard is hard-wired, and as I don’t have a US one I cannot change it without major problems.The requirement for a Finnish keyboard was literally hard coded into the first version of Linux. Hilarious.
In my opinion, I just don’t understand permissive licenses. For example, with FreeBSD’s license, companies can essentially “steal” the hard-earned efforts and use them to enrich themselves. For example, FreeBSD could have been a gaming OS, as the PlayStation’s OS is FreeBSD. However, they didn’t give anything back to the community.
Copyleft licenses, on the other hand, require companies to contribute any changes they make to the code back to the community so that it benefits the community as a whole. In this case, there’s no “stealing”, companies need to respect the community’s efforts by giving back.
That’s my two cents anyway.
Both licenses were made before late stage capitalism started in earnest, and when the Net was young, so there’s the matter of perspective.
Imho the GPL was born out of ideology, whereas the BSD was out of a murican university environment (i.e. preparing proto-capitalists to enter the market).
The debate is endless.It’s not stealing when you willingly allow someone to use it however they want. OpenBSD writes: “We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to.” If your goal is to polish something like OpenSSH until it’s as good as it can be, the world is better off when robust and secure software spread, also into proprietary systems. When companies use OpenSSH, it does not take away anything from OpenBSD, they are not competitors.
Copy pasting my other reply about the same thing:
I would argue that BSD licensing keeps projects more free of corporate influence if started by hobbyists.
Corpo forks BSD/Apache/whatever software, doesn’t publish source, nerds don’t use it and look for the original, the end.
Corpo forks copyleft software, publishes releases on GutHib with literal zip files in the repo semi annually. Original maintainer gets taunted with “but the corpo one has feature X, the code is free, you should use it”. If they don’t merge it, they get labeled an egoist and people go use the corporate one. If they do merge it, eventually the entire project gets bloated and barely readable, is held together by @redhat.com patches, and eventually all development is just corporate decisions. There’s no escape.
You know, we are all victims of it ourselves. I am using Firefox rn. There was little to no “conversion” as they started out corporate. They have patches merged from the Tor people for actual privacy, although removed from the settings because “meh, nobody would want that” (sponsors would disapprove). The privacy they are marketing for normies is a list of like 20 domains.
Yeah uh so we are very private by default, there’s no google tracking but if a site loads an ad or a youtube embed there’s google tracking, also we block embeds for privacy except specifically youtube.
It’s all corporate decisions. While I don’t use the specific variant(s) and didn’t observe it, I once saw the Firefox home page on someone else’s device. It was football stats followed by “sponsored links”. I thought it was Edge for a second.
And there’s no escape. Web pages are no longer actual pages oftentimes, they are fat blobs of 3 language conversions on top of each other targeting only the specific 3 (sometimes 2) big brand web browsers as the backend: Firefox, Chromium and Apple’s Webkit fork. They are all corporate. The fat blob generators are also corporate.
If freebsd was copyleft PlayStation would’ve never used it in the first place. Same as the BSD TCP/IP stack with windows.
The TCP/IP stack is a good example where permissive is helpful. Getting a protocol stack adopted. In a world of a mix of open and closed, permissive can paper over cracks.
To play devil’s advocate for a second - no-one is stealing anything, the code is still right where it was. If I willingly give someone a sandwich, did they steal it? Of course not.
There was a reason that PS chose FreeBSD, and it was because of the licence. If FreeBSD used the GPL then PS wouldn’t have used it, hence there never would have been a FreeBSD gaming OS either way.
Exactly, it’s a defining feature of the project. They don’t care how you use the code as long as you use it. It’s just a different philosophy.
BSDs are just doing their own thing and whether they benefit or not from others using their work is not really a concern.
Take OpenSSH, it’s used by virtually every operating system and just exists to be used. It’s a great contribution to software even if OpenBSD is a tiny marginal thing used by only those that need it. They are cool with that.
Another way to think of it is the old “you wouldn’t steal a car” commercial.
A company using BSD in their product cannot “steal” it, because we still have the BSDs. They can’t take them away, so its not stealing. It just comes down to your personality and how much you value control over what they are doing with it (No shade either way from me, if its your work)
In the end, I think it matters less than it seems. Companies can use Linux via either tivoization or proprietary software on top without contributing back, and other companies voluntarily submit patches or pay FreeBSD developers because maintaining a closed source fork is expensive.
