• 0 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2025

help-circle



  • It allows freebsd to be true to the BSD license, and I agree with the author that it makes licensing easier. BSD will always be free and incredibly permissive, and I don’t see this changing anything. But a lot of the strides that linux has made is because people need to release their changes.

    BSD on the other hand doesn’t require giving back, so you get Apple that was the largest company in the world building off of the work of FreeBSD. I certainly don’t see FreeBSD being comparable to macOS like Fedora is to RHEL. It’s more like Apple took what they wanted and walked away.


  • The upshot of the BSD-license in the case of FreeBSD is that it has found it and its components used in many commercial products, including MacOS/OS X, the PlayStation’s Orbis OS, and of course the BSD networking stack is happily used in Windows, macOS and just about anywhere else. Meanwhile the GPL forced Linksys to open the firmware to its WRT54G series of routers, ultimately leading to the development of OpenWrt and similar projects.

    They make it sound like the *WRTs were the worst thing to happen to consumer networking and that corporations not being required to contribute back to projects has made BSD stronger, rather than given companies free labor. I find the *BSDs to be pretty interesting, but let’s not pretend that they’re benefiting from companies using their work. Very shilly tone to this article.