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I've been in few famous tech $megacorp. I've seen Open Source projects with many companies behind them perform poorly because of BSD/MIT.

It's in the best interest of a large company to contribute until the project gains a large userbase willing to pay for extra features, while selling forks (with added proprietary features).

Then a company quietly pulls out of upstream development to focus on developing and selling their fork. Chain reaction and the other companies quickly follow the example.

Customers trusted that they were using a "mostly" Open Source project but suddenly end up having to choose between proprietary products with an open core.

Openstack is a prime example of this.

>If my project had been BSD, I might have seen someone making money from my project and associate my name with something that I had zero control on.

If he went along with his product being forced to be open, what then? It still has your name associated with it, he might still sell some copies. I'm just not getting the principles.

I would just have taken his source, compiled it and provided it for free -- he had no real intentions of opening it, and in fact never released his 'code' afterward, which proved my point.

it's not the first time I see that, at my previous company, a guy took most of my in-house (closed source) middleware layers and was selling them as a 'product' as is on the interweb.

I don't think it's right to call that having control. But whatever, your post was more honest than the average GPL advocate's.

Most people wont buy something for money that they could have for free. Not just for utilitarian reasons. Although on one hand the logical consideration is do I value whatever I'm getting in exchange more than the money I am paying on the other hand the perception that someone is getting the software for free, adding 1% value and then charging you creates the impression that they are getting an overly large advantage out of the interaction and nobody likes this.

People would rather be objectively worse off rather than feel that they had been taken advantage of.

If we look at it from a utilitarian perspective having someone who didn't add much capture all of the commercial value seems to be pretty poor. If the feature he was adding was worthwhile I bet he could have been honest and convinced people to pay him to add it. Everyone would have benefited and paying him would have been worthwhile and necessary because while he couldn't have legally kept it closed source, he didn't have to write or release it at all.

> I'm sure that if Linux wasn't GPL, you'd have 'vendors' selling 'HP Linux' and 'Corp Linux' to their locked in customers in no time at all. The only reason Linux grew up to this point is that the vendors are forced to contribute back and cooperate (up to a point).

I don't know. For such a complex project like linux you can't do all by yourself and you most likely want all the improvements and extensions done by other people.

To be able to incorporate all these changes you have to keep your code base compatible and the easiest way to do this is to give back your changes.

But even if this seems to be the most sensible way to go, an other license might have allowed people to be a lot more unreasonable.

The *BSDs show clearly what would have happened, most hardware vendors that ship some BSD variant on their hardware don't contribute anything back.

Saying that the only difference for these big projects is their license, seems quite a bit simplified.

How is the contribution process organized? How willing are the developers to incorporate foreign extensions?

There a quite a few factors that determine how such big projects work and at the end it's IMHO always the people involved that make the difference.

That is simply not true. For instance iXsystems contributes back to FreeBSD snd also sponsors the foundation.

On the other hand a lot of WiFi router vendors violate the GPL by not releasing the code and contribute nothing back to Linux.

most != all

And one counter-example isn't enough refutation.

not saying i believe either of you. just saying, language matters.

NetApp Juniper Sony Apple Panassas.... These all have commits to FreeBSD. When you use it, you do tend to collaborate with upstream a bit.

For every iXsystems (who are excellent Free Software citizens) you have many NetApp, EMC and Isilons, who use the FreeBSD code to build profitable products on and give nothing in return.

NetApp is a very good example, as they contribute NFS code back to Linux but not FreeBSD.

Why do you think that might be ?

A more complete lie you could not have stated. Check the FreeBSD commit logs. All those vendors commit code back to the project. I see commits almost everyday from them. But thanks for spewing lies.

It's easier to hand out these alternative facts that support the GPL's mission.

>For every iXsystems (who are excellent Free Software citizens) you have many NetApp, EMC and Isilons, who use the FreeBSD code to build profitable products on and give nothing in return. NetApp is a very good example, as they contribute NFS code back to Linux but not FreeBSD.

Literally every company you mentioned contributes code to FreeBSD, so what are you even talking about[1][2][3]?

[1]: https://freshbsd.org/search?project=freebsd&q=netapp

[2]: https://freshbsd.org/search?project=freebsd&q=emc

[3]: https://freshbsd.org/search?project=freebsd&q=iXsystems

Oh great, FreeBSD has the WAFL filesystem now ! That's great news, I must have missed the release announcement ! Is it in the main repository ?

Hint, shitty little few line fixes != contributing back.

> Oh great, FreeBSD has the WAFL filesystem now ! That's great news, I must have missed the release announcement ! Is it in the main repository ? Hint, shitty little few line fixes != contributing back.

What a disingenuous response, Linux does not have the WAFL Filesystem and so why point out wether FreeBSD has it or not. Also NetAPP released Bhyve and EMC Isilon has made over 4000 commits to the FreeBSD tree, those are serious contributions regardless off what you say.

As a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy board you should seriously stop spreading Misinformation and being so dismissive of other FLOSS projects.

GPL enforcement of said wifi routers is the _only_ reason we have drivers for several wifi chipsets. Perhaps ironically, the BSDs benefited from this too.

Most of the people who are anti-GPL are either naive or want to profit off of someone else's code without contributing anything back.

For me, GPL doesn't go nearly far enough, and I licence everything I write under AGPL.

For several reasons I use mostly commercial commercial software, but everything I write outside work regardless of how useless it may be, is always released under GPL.

Like safari and chrome for WebKit