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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

>I'm a Linux guy so my view is probably biased. All I'm seeing is BSD licensed projects being ripped off by corporations left and right. Maybe we mean different things with the word, sharing. Netflix using FreeBSD and their idea of giving back to the project is telling them this will lead to their code being tested really well? That sounds to me like "please create a web page for us for free, it will lead to more exposure for you".

Where are you seeing these corporations ripping off FreeBSD? Netflix has contributed code in the past, currently over a thousand commits in FreeBSD, and there's no reason to doubt their intention to continue doing so.

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I worked for 5 years for a company taking from *BSD and not contributing much. Lately they started monetary donation, but no code.

Weirdly, I actually think that's a feature not a bug. It keep ill intentioned idiots from gumming up the works because they are forced to contribute and really don't have the corporate beliefs or culture that would make them productive and not a distraction.

The problem is that BSD problem is not so much money, but manpower, on top of that the cathedral model does not really scale. Just from a technical standpoint, no BSD is using any modern DCVS, beside dragonfly.

Money is always a problem, and fixes a lot of manpower issues when you can pay developers. The whole DCVS is a bizarre argument. I would have to see actual studies that show the BSD run organizations do not scale.

Lack of proper DCVS hinder the possibility of committers to publish early version of their work outside huge diff. Getting the code and submitting changes are a huge PITA. With the git/github/gitlab workflow, you can clone a project, fork it, push a fix and submit a PR faster than a CVS / SVN checkout. It's not hard to find out why 90's cathedral style hierarchies hinder development process.

That being said, unless you are already a committer, it's gonna be very difficult to get your code blessed...

That being said, unless you are already a committer, it's gonna be very difficult to get your code blessed...

Are there examples of this? Since I see people sending patches that aren't committers. I honestly would want to see some actual data.

Frustrating experience.

>because they are forced to contribute

but they aren't. GPL forces to release source, not contribute.

That’s a contribution and then they feel entitled because folks who don’t see the business case in the first place are going to be a pain.

Apple, Sony, a couple of companies selling routers,...

They are on their right though, that is what the BSD licence is all about, code for free no questions asked.

I'll grant you there are probably router companies ripping them off, though that's true of Linux too. Your other two have both contributed much back to FreeBSD, so I'm unsure what you mean.

With Linux there is a legal way to get hold of those contributions, to anyone willing to invest time and money into it.

Yes, they have contributed back and I referred that in another thread, just not what they were supposed to under a copyleft license.

Long time ago, didn't Microsoft pulled the complete TCP/IP stack from OpenBSD/FreeBSD? I think they still have an /etc/hosts hidden somewhere in their filesystem...

Yes, it got rewritten on Vista.

> Where are you seeing these corporations ripping off FreeBSD?

It's not like FreeBSD has a shiny DE courtesy of Apple...

FreeBSD doesn't even have a DE, I have no clue what you are talking about here.

That is what I'm talking about. Apple has benefited from FreeBSD.

(There is Lumina, in terms of DEs.)

This doesn't make any sense. FreeBSD never had a desktop environment, so how is Apple ripping them off by not giving them the one they made?

The only way for me to make sense of your comments is to imagine that you're asserting not only that no-one would want to run a DE with FreeBSD but in fact that there is no way to run a desktop environment with FreeBSD.

However, that is clearly not the case, since Xfce and KDE and so forth work on FreeBSD. Further, there is even a DE developed for TrueOS, which is FreeBSD-based: Lumina ( https://www.lumina-desktop.org/ ).

If you download a release of FreeBSD, that image will not contain a desktop environment. If you look through there source code, no desktop environment, something also true of Linux. Of course you can install third party packages, including a range of desktop environments.

So, considering FreeBSD has no desktop environment, and likely little desire for one, how are they being ripped off by Apple's failure to give them their DE?

> If you look through there source code, no desktop environment, something also true of Linux.

Right, a DE is not part of the kernel, or even perhaps the base install. But DE is something people do use with FreeBSD - there are people who run DEs.

> FreeBSD has no desktop environment, and likely little desire for one

The development of Lumina is a BSD-associated endeavour, so the desire part does't seem quite true.

> how are they being ripped off by Apple's failure to give them their DE?

The DE is just an example of something that could have been useful. The point is that Apple hasn't really contributed back to FreeBSD - the real-world behaviour of large corporations highlights the drawbacks of non-reciprocal licences.

>Right, a DE is not part of the kernel, or even perhaps the base install. But DE is something people do use with FreeBSD - there are people who run DEs.

The base install is FreeBSD, it is the code and system the team created and what the FreeBSD foundational raises money to support. If Apple ripped off FreeBSD, it would these people that are getting ripped off. You can install a wide variety of other software on your computer alongside FreeBSD, but that doesn't make them a part of FreeBSD.

>The DE is just an example of something that could have been useful. The point is that Apple hasn't really contributed back to FreeBSD -

As far as contributing back unrelated things that would be useful, they have contributed back LLVM.

>the real-world behaviour of large corporations highlights the drawbacks of non-reciprocal licences.

This wasn't real world behavior, and FreeBSD using the GPL wouldn't have forced Apple to give them their DE. A program, say a DE, on a GPL operating system does not need to be distributed under an open source license.

> This wasn't real world behavior, and FreeBSD using the GPL wouldn't have forced Apple to give them their DE. A program, say a DE, on a GPL operating system does not need to be distributed under an open source license.

Depends on how the DE integrates with the other components.

Real-world behaviour: the ecosystem that has a GPL-licensed kernel has much wider adoption that the ecosystem which uses primarily BSD licences. I know this isn't fully attributable to licensing, since the BSDs were afflicted with legal issues during the time when Linux was taking off, which surely contributed to the situation, but still the BSD licences encourage certain types of entities to take without contributing back the ecosystem. Though I admire the idealism of BSD-type licences.

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