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Comment by jburwell | Hacker News Reader

Since they use the FreeBSD userland, it seems appropriate for Apple to kick in a little cash to the FreeBSD Foundation. The remaining ~$150k is an utter bargain considering how important those pieces are to iOS and Mac OS X ...

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They give us code, which is even better than money, really.

Not to say that we wouldn't appreciate monetary donations too, but Apple doesn't "owe" us anything.

> Apple doesn't "owe" us anything.

That's the beautiful thing about BSD-style licenses. Once the code is out there, nobody ever has to reinvent the wheel for legal reasons again - only technical.

And the beautiful part of it is that the incentives work in the right way. The reason for that is pretty simple - code that you submit to projects is code you don't have to maintain when the next upgrade come.

I find it embarrassing that you don't have corporate sponsors that give you guys carte blanche at this point. Not only do you guys deserve it, but your efforts are on a piece of software with an incredibly liberal and corporate friendly license.

I mean how doesn't Apple/Sony benefit from keeping FreeBSD incredibly healthy?

FreeBSD has corporate sponsors. In addition to the many companies who hire FreeBSD developers and let them loose to hack code and the companies which provide lots of hardware and hosting infrastructure (Juniper, Yahoo, NYI), the FreeBSD Foundation has been receiving large donations every year from NetApp and Hudson River Trading, as well as smaller annual donations from iXsystems, Google, McAfee, and SwissCom. And then there was the anonymous $100k donation last year... I don't know where that came from (obviously) but I'm guessing it was a large corporate FreeBSD user.

My guess, Microsoft.

Could be, but I don't know why they'd want to be anonymous. My guess is that it's a company which is using FreeBSD but doesn't want to announce that publicly -- it's not uncommon for companies to consider "using FreeBSD" to be a tactical advantage they don't want their competition to know about.

> Since they use the FreeBSD userland

...let's be very grateful they didn't rewrite everything from scratch...

OSX userland is a wild mix of outdated GNU and BSD tools.

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