OpenBSD Drops Support For Loadable Kernel Modules

[jacob]

the GPL is not communist.

That still is burped out by people who do not understand that the BSD licence is THE reason why BSD failed against linux. BSD style licences promote and reward egotistical behaviour. GPL promotes and reward cooperation.

Since cooperation the only way to go forward, BSDs are doomed to failure.

To put it another way: if, as a developer, I choose to release something as open-source, I may select a BSD licence, let others appropriate it and then put me out of business, or I may select the GPL and let others use it on the condition that they cooperate with me. Put like that it looks like a no-brainer.

If you learn that an exploit exists in some network feature/driver you never use nor will ever use - and luckily you compiled that feature/driver into a module, off it goes! Into the abyss with it. Hole closed.

If that same feature is in the kernel. You got a problem.

Oh - and all those people wanking about OpenBSD's stellar security. It is not so stellar if you look behind the grandeur and PR-speak.

On an exposed machine, LKM support *is* potentially dangerous, but there are various ways to address that. One is to require modules to be digitally signed, as in Linux, which essentially solves the problem. Another one is not to have LKM at all, as in OpenBSD, which is simply moronic.

[nslay]

To put it another way: if, as a developer, I choose to release something as open-source, I may select a BSD licence, let others appropriate it and then put me out of business, or I may select the GPL and let others use it on the condition that they cooperate with me. Put like that it looks like a no-brainer.

Licensing it as BSDL does it make more viable for companies to use (although, trust me, a lot of companies don't want to touch any OSS with a 10 foot pole) and if companies do you use your code, browny points on your CV/Resume ("Founder of Blah Blah Project, used in Product X, Y, Z").

Anyway, it's not like Juniper or Sony put the FreeBSD project out of business despite using modified closed source versions of FreeBSD. Your simplistic point-of-view just doesn't seem to be true in practice. I think people will always prefer an open source version that solves 90% of the problem versus a non-free version of the same code that solves 99% of the problem.

I can think of nasty uses of GPL. I could write some very useful software, license it under GPL to bolster its popularity. Then I can offer a commercial licensing option for a fee. This is already done, for example, with BDB and gSOAP. GPL can be a good way to get your name and product out there. You exploit the OSS community as an advertising platform to sell your commercial licensed version. In light of that, permissive licenses truly are generous and free.

[energyman]

true, companies have not put FreeBSD out of business. They just haven't contributed back anything of worth.

That is why as a company I would never allow my employees to work on BSD licenced projects. Some other company might snatch it up and I am screwed.

With GPL code on the other hand everybody has to work together and nobody is able to screw the other over.

That is why BSD is anti commerce and and anti cooperation at the same time, while linux is corporation friendly AND pro-cooperation.

[nslay]

true, companies have not put FreeBSD out of business. They just haven't contributed back anything of worth.

That is why as a company I would never allow my employees to work on BSD licenced projects. Some other company might snatch it up and I am screwed.

With GPL code on the other hand everybody has to work together and nobody is able to screw the other over.

That is why BSD is anti commerce and and anti cooperation at the same time, while linux is corporation friendly AND pro-cooperation.

So, I went ahead and scanned the entire commit log from FreeBSD, of it I found 200+ different companies that contributed to FreeBSD.

Those that made 10 or more commits are given below:

• The Weather Channel : 20
• iXsystems, Inc. : 60
• Citrix Systems R&D : 18
• Nokia : 46
• Yandex LLC : 17
• Isilon Systems : 10
• Bright Path Solutions : 10
• Bally Wulff Games & Entertainment GmbH : 14
• ISPsystem : 13
• Myricom Inc. : 18
• Spectra Logic : 31
• Juniper Networks : 31
• Spectralogic : 10
• Sandvine Incorporated : 105
• iXsystems, inc. : 10
• Netflix : 17
• Juniper Networks, Inc. : 19
• nCircle Network Security, Inc. : 10
• Apple, Inc. : 30
• ADARA Networks : 15
• home.pl : 19
• iXsystems : 77
• Google Inc : 34
• EMC / Isilon storage division : 47
• Isilon Systems, Inc. : 186
• Intel : 156
• EMC / Isilon Storage Division : 76
• Spectra Logic Corporation : 44
• Multiplay : 20
• Nginx, Inc. : 51
• Google : 10
• Hobnob, Inc. : 44
• Google, Inc. : 38
• Rambler : 17

Sony's not there, but Juniper, Apple, Netflix, Yahoo (Yahoo has 14 commits under various names) and Panasas contributed (Panasas has 8 commits). I guess it's not necessarily true that companies don't contribute back to BSDL projects.

Here's how to reproduce this list:
First checkout the FreeBSD repository with svn:

svn checkout http://svn.freebsd.org/base/stable/10

Then run:

svn log > /tmp/Log.txt

Use the following awk script to extract the contents.

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

BEGIN {
  threshold=10
}

/Sponsored by:/ {
  sub("^[ \t]*Sponsored by:[ \t]*","")
  sub("[ \t\r]+$", "")

  company=$0
  Histogram[company]++
}

END {
  for (company in Histogram) {
    count = Histogram[company]
    if (count >= threshold)
      print company " : " count
  }
}