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

[phoronix]

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

FreeBSD has published its 2022'Q4 quarterly status report that outlines all of the progress made by this open-source BSD operating system project...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q4-2022-Highlights

[andre30correia]

the problem of mit license, apple/sony and others take the code and they can't even give a dolar for the devs

[Alexmitter]

the problem of mit license, apple/sony and others take the code and they can't even give a dolar for the devs

Their own fault for not using the GPL.

[RejectModernity]

the problem of mit license, apple/sony and others take the code and they can't even give a dolar for the devs

Whoa, hold on for a second cowboy. Apple Donated 1,000–$4,999 in year 2021-2022. That's pretty generous, it's like 1-5 iphones or something.

[ryao]

the problem of mit license, apple/sony and others take the code and they can't even give a dolar for the devs

No open source license exists that addresses this. Even the GPL does not do a thing about it. The beauty of open source is that it enables others to build on what you did, which pushes technology forward. Money is secondary to that.

I have done years of OSS development for which I have never been paid. Large businesses use my work, including Amazon. I am happy to see that. If I did not want to see that, I would not have done OSS development in the first place.

[Estranged1906]

No open source license exists that addresses this. Even the GPL does not do a thing about it. The beauty of open source is that it enables others to build on what you did, which pushes technology forward. Money is secondary to that.

You have no entitlement to money if someone takes your GPL code but at least you get to see and use the code that Apple/Sony/Netflix write. Or even better, the companies submit their code directly to the upstream (you). With a BSD license you get absolutely nothing back.

[BingoNightly]

the problem of mit license, apple/sony and others take the code and they can't even give a dolar for the devs

They got over $1M

[mdedetrich]

the problem of mit license, apple/sony and others take the code and they can't even give a dolar for the devs

Try again, they are some of the heaviest contributors back to the FreeBSD, so is netflix. Also Apple publishes their OS sources online (see https://opensource.apple.com/releases/), its their userspace programs which are proprietary but thats no different to Linux.

This MIT fud needs to stop, there may be reasons why FreeBSD isn't as popular as Linux but there is scant evidence its due to its license.

You have no entitlement to money if someone takes your GPL code but at least you get to see and use the code that Apple/Sony/Netflix write. Or even better, the companies submit their code directly to the upstream (you). With a BSD license you get absolutely nothing back.

Have you looked at https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ ? Apple publishes their sources, its just userspace apps which are closed and that aint no different to Linux

[kpedersen]

They got over $1M

Indeed. They are better funded than most popular Linux distros.

OpenBSD is quite impressive too: https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html

Though some of this (i.e from Microsoft) is for OpenSSH and other projects that underpin the industry.

Still very cool to see John Carmack contributed financially (and a large amount!), including the terminal rendering improvements a while back.

[ryao]

You have no entitlement to money if someone takes your GPL code but at least you get to see and use the code that Apple/Sony/Netflix write.

You picked some very bad examples. Apple releases a fair amount of their code in the form of code drops:

https://opensource.apple.com/releases/

They are also doing a ton of work on shared components like LLVM and WebKit. They also funded CUPS development single handedly until the CUPS developer decided to leave his guaranteed lifetime employment at Apple.

Sony is well known for keeping their contributions low key:

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/ut1dd6/how_much_did_sony_contribute_to_the_freebsd/

Netflix is a well known contributor to FreeBSD:

https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/fosdem/looney-netflix_and_freebsd/

That said, you are not entitled to see changes companies made to GPL code unless they ship it to you in a product and you request the source code. Most of the time, only masochists will want to see the code, since it is often hacks rather than good upstreamable fixes. Getting code drops like these is rarely ever beneficial. Even Linus Torvalds will readily admit that code from code drops is largely useless.

Or even better, the companies submit their code directly to the upstream (you).

This can happen under any OSS license. There is nothing in the GPL that makes this more or less likely than it is with any OSS license.

With a BSD license you get absolutely nothing back.

You get about as much back with a BSD license as Linus Torvalds gets back with the GPL. He is not interested in code dumps, so the GPL gives him nothing that a BSD license would not. The only code he wants is good quality code that takes into account his feedback and has people maintaining it. Nothing in either license requires this. 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. Thus, the BSD license is just as good at receiving code back as the GPL.