FreeBSD Ends 2022 Short Of Fundraising Goal But Continues Driving New Features

[BingoNightly]

People do it mostly because they do not want to maintain forks, and the desire to avoid the pain of maintaining forks is independent of the license.

Exactly, technical debt is more expensive than many realize.

[ll1025]

ITT: FOSS advocates upset that others are using their intentionally free, no-strings-attached code without paying money or feeling obligated to repay the favor.

If the FreeBSD folks wanted to ensure that they got paid, that starts to sound like the sorts of proprietary licenses that arent too popular around here.

[mdedetrich]

The hilariously ironic thing about this whole hur dur "The reason why the BSD's aren't that successful is because of their non GPL license" is that it also completely ignores the disconnect licenses can have between their theoretical benefits and reality.

Want a good example of this? Have a look at how Linux turned out with Android. Companies who didn't conform to the GPL mentality found ways around it and right now 90%+ of the phones that you buy you don't even have control over because the bootloader is locked, and because of this Android itself is as locked as Windows is (some would say ironically moreso because of the bootloader).

The real reason behind the BSD's not being as popular is largely historical and not relevant to the license. From what I gather there seem to be 2 critical reasons behind this

1. There was a lawsuit in the 90's pushed by unix (apparently also supported by Microsoft behind the scenes) which the BSD's were caught up in. This really didn't help their adoption, because people avoided the BSD's like the plague in what was a very critical time.
2. BSD's had a different attitude when it came to contributions. In the past from what I know, BSD's were a lot more strict when it came to accepting code contributions. They only wanted high quality code/contributions and this significantly reduce how many contributors they had. This strategy actually worked up until roughly a decade ago, i.e. one of the main reasons why Netflix picked FreeBSD over Linux for their streaming caching servers was that Linux's net stack was trash at the time (note this has been resolved since). However once you get to a critical amount of contributors, even if code is contributed thats not perfect someone else will find the problem which is the state at which Linux is now.

This is ironically the problem with the various BSD's. (moreso the popular ones), its actually more reliant on companies open source contributors then a lot of small time contributors.