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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Obviously these hugely profitable companies don't pay enough. Otherwise I should not need to donate.

Obviously Windows should be free, with all the huge companies that use that. The logic makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense if you don't personally own or use Windows. I don't pay Microsoft again to play TitanFall just because their servers are hosted on Azure.

I understand we all probably use tools everyday that can be attributed to these projects and I don't mean to imply that you shouldn't give them money. Just that the Netflix/WhatsApp comments seem a little disingenuous. That shouldn't be in the "reasons you need BSD", those are just reasons Neflix and WhatsApp need BSD.

You might one day want to run a startup or a project and then you could just do it on FreeBSD in any way you like, given the permissive license and this is exactly the reason why you need BSD, not only because Netflix or WhatsApp uses them to serve you the service.

I should donate to every project on github in case I need to use one somewhere in the future!

I can guarantee you'll need to use an operating system, they're rather essential. Ensuring the basic building blocks are available for future use is beneficial, and showing what has previously been built with them shows why.

No need to be smug, FreeBSD is hardly the only operating system available to us.

I'm not saying that it is, just that you can't compare it to "every project on github."

I'll try to explain my reasoning, then.

If Netflix and other very profitable companies are, as I'm told, contributing in both code and money to FreeBSD, and if I'm also being asked to donate, then the contributions from said corporations are obviously not enough to cover the costs of FreeBSD development.

Since I pay for Netflix, why should I double-pay by donating to FreeBSD? Seems to me that Netflix should be digging a little deeper into their pockets.

I don't understand your point re: Windows. If companies are paying for Windows, then Microsoft is receiving a payment which they have presumably set at a level they deem sufficient to support continuing development of Windows and other projects. I see no parallel to my point about FreeBSD other than the fact that both are operating systems.

You don't pay Netflix to use FreeBSD, you pay them for a streaming video service that would be indistinguishable to you if they used Linux.

I'd expect Netflix to pay enough for FreeBSD to fund things they're interested in for running their own infrastructure. This is how free software development works, if you have an itch you either scratch it yourself or pay someone to scratch it.

You wouldn't want a FreeBSD that would be entirely funded by Netflix either, because nobody would be working on anything Netflix itself didn't need, such a system would quickly end up being useless to you.

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