General Public License lincensed code
Lol I read Linus’ release notes for Linux .01 (linked in the article) and I really liked this part listed under the hardware requirements
Finnish keyboard (oh, you can use a US keyboard, but not without some practise :-)
The Finnish keyboard is hard-wired, and as I don’t have a US one I cannot change it without major problems.The requirement for a Finnish keyboard was literally hard coded into the first version of Linux. Hilarious.
Seeing where BSDs are today vs Linux/GNU I would say history made it clear already.
Capitalism will 100% use and give zero every single time when permitted.
In a sane and healthy software company, they would contribute their changes back to BSD just because it makes easier to apply latest BSD changes amd security fixes.
Most companies wont. They fork, modify the BSD code for their specific hardware, sell it, and never ever update thier software.
Well, Sony contributes, but not as much as Netflix (mostly by paying for development, especially LLVM development)
Apple hired the founder of LLVM and paid him to work on LLVM.
LLVM is pretty important to FreeBSD.
Plenty of big companies contribute to BSD financially or let their devs commit code to BSD because maintaining your own fork is tedious work and the smaller your changes from the upstream source, the easier your life.
Unfortunately most companies don’t have a software culture or even understand it. Heck there are entire nations (like Japan) that are culturally at odds with software. It doesn’t stop them from making software (you can’t NOT make software in today’s day and age), they just go about it in furtive, roundabout and ultimately very inefficient ways.
It’s weird because modern software development borrows heavily from industrial process optimizations (some of which were invented and perfected in Japan, ironically) and there are clear, proven benefits to cooperation upstream in projects like Linux… and yet they still fight it every step of the way in the name of “IP”.
It doesn’t help either that there are countries (US, Japan, what do you know) that nurture the concept of software patents that have a chilling effect on sharing.
In my opinion, I just don’t understand permissive licenses. For example, with FreeBSD’s license, companies can essentially “steal” the hard-earned efforts and use them to enrich themselves. For example, FreeBSD could have been a gaming OS, as the PlayStation’s OS is FreeBSD. However, they didn’t give anything back to the community.
Copyleft licenses, on the other hand, require companies to contribute any changes they make to the code back to the community so that it benefits the community as a whole. In this case, there’s no “stealing”, companies need to respect the community’s efforts by giving back.
That’s my two cents anyway.
Copy pasting my other reply about the same thing:
I would argue that BSD licensing keeps projects more free of corporate influence if started by hobbyists.
Corpo forks BSD/Apache/whatever software, doesn’t publish source, nerds don’t use it and look for the original, the end.
Corpo forks copyleft software, publishes releases on GutHib with literal zip files in the repo semi annually. Original maintainer gets taunted with “but the corpo one has feature X, the code is free, you should use it”. If they don’t merge it, they get labeled an egoist and people go use the corporate one. If they do merge it, eventually the entire project gets bloated and barely readable, is held together by @redhat.com patches, and eventually all development is just corporate decisions. There’s no escape.
You know, we are all victims of it ourselves. I am using Firefox rn. There was little to no “conversion” as they started out corporate. They have patches merged from the Tor people for actual privacy, although removed from the settings because “meh, nobody would want that” (sponsors would disapprove). The privacy they are marketing for normies is a list of like 20 domains.
Yeah uh so we are very private by default, there’s no google tracking but if a site loads an ad or a youtube embed there’s google tracking, also we block embeds for privacy except specifically youtube.
It’s all corporate decisions. While I don’t use the specific variant(s) and didn’t observe it, I once saw the Firefox home page on someone else’s device. It was football stats followed by “sponsored links”. I thought it was Edge for a second.
And there’s no escape. Web pages are no longer actual pages oftentimes, they are fat blobs of 3 language conversions on top of each other targeting only the specific 3 (sometimes 2) big brand web browsers as the backend: Firefox, Chromium and Apple’s Webkit fork. They are all corporate. The fat blob generators are also corporate.
Another way to think of it is the old “you wouldn’t steal a car” commercial.
A company using BSD in their product cannot “steal” it, because we still have the BSDs. They can’t take them away, so its not stealing. It just comes down to your personality and how much you value control over what they are doing with it (No shade either way from me, if its your work)
In the end, I think it matters less than it seems. Companies can use Linux via either tivoization or proprietary software on top without contributing back, and other companies voluntarily submit patches or pay FreeBSD developers because maintaining a closed source fork is expensive.
To play devil’s advocate for a second - no-one is stealing anything, the code is still right where it was. If I willingly give someone a sandwich, did they steal it? Of course not.
There was a reason that PS chose FreeBSD, and it was because of the licence. If FreeBSD used the GPL then PS wouldn’t have used it, hence there never would have been a FreeBSD gaming OS either way.
There basically isn’t FreeBSD do for gaming as their work is locked away and not shared. If there was no BSD, Sony would have been forced to use a copyleft OS, or make their own. There was a time, a long time ago, where NetBSD was used in routers, etc. But Linux hardware support got to be so much better than NetBSDs, it got to hard to not use it. The more who used, and where forced to open their work, the better Linux got. Today it’s all Linux.
Worth pointing out Oracle/Sun and IBM and OpenOffice. Before the buyout, Sun were changing the OpenOffice license to permissive in a version they would sell to IBM who used the code for their closed Lotus Office. This could be done as OpenOffice had a contributor lience agreement where copyright was handed over. So Sun had all the copyright, so could relience at will. When Oracle bought Sun, it was the final straw. So LibreOffice was born from the copyleft version, without copyright ownership, so locked open. All the development moved there. Oracle relicensed OpenOffice to permissive, and tried donating the project to Apache, but no one cared. It’s been a husk for well over a decade now. And thing good can be copied straight into LibreOffice, but not the other way round. The free money for OpenOffice is over for Oracle, as is the cheap code for IBM. LibreOffice healthier than OpenOffice ever was.
Exactly, it’s a defining feature of the project. They don’t care how you use the code as long as you use it. It’s just a different philosophy.
BSDs are just doing their own thing and whether they benefit or not from others using their work is not really a concern.
Take OpenSSH, it’s used by virtually every operating system and just exists to be used. It’s a great contribution to software even if OpenBSD is a tiny marginal thing used by only those that need it. They are cool with that.
If freebsd was copyleft PlayStation would’ve never used it in the first place. Same as the BSD TCP/IP stack with windows.
The TCP/IP stack is a good example where permissive is helpful. Getting a protocol stack adopted. In a world of a mix of open and closed, permissive can paper over cracks.
Both licenses were made before late stage capitalism started in earnest, and when the Net was young, so there’s the matter of perspective.
Imho the GPL was born out of ideology, whereas the BSD was out of a murican university environment (i.e. preparing proto-capitalists to enter the market).
The debate is endless.It’s not stealing when you willingly allow someone to use it however they want. OpenBSD writes: “We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to.” If your goal is to polish something like OpenSSH until it’s as good as it can be, the world is better off when robust and secure software spread, also into proprietary systems. When companies use OpenSSH, it does not take away anything from OpenBSD, they are not competitors.
i believe it has the advantage of corporate interests not affecting the projects direction. i think linux is doing ok now (other than way too much redhat stuff) but i’m not sure if this is gonna continue after linus is gone.
What does this mean? Can someone explain in simple terms?
BSD is a permissive license that allows sometime to take the code and update/change it as they see fit. There are no requirements to publish those changes, and I believe you can license it under a different license.
GPL on the other hand does require that you publish your changes, and that those changes also be licensed under GPL. Thus also requires that a company does due diligence and states what pieces of code they used were GPL and give credit
So in removing the last bit of GPL code, someone can take FreeBSD and do whatever they want without having to worry about what pieces of code might fall under different licenses.
Thank you. I like the GPL idea more, to be honest.
The only requirement of the BSD license is you credit the code somewhere in a disclosure. That’s pretty much it.
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.
let’s not pretend that they’re benefiting from companies using their work.
Of course they are. Sony, Netflix and the like are major contributors to the project.
Of the ones listed, Apple and Sony have definitely contributed back to FreeBSD. Apple hired the lead LLVM dev and paid him to keep working on it. Sony has paid for LLVM development in particular, but also development of other parts of FreeBSD. Source on the Sony bit, which also mentions that for example Netflix is an even bigger contributor
There’s plenty of benefit in contributing back to permissive projects you use, because you have less maintenance overhead if the diff between your fork and the upstream source is smaller.
WRT was the only reason some of those routers were even usable.
Seriously, it’s the only reason I bought one. Plus, my WRT-54gl is still supported 20 years later on DD-WRT, not that it’s all that useful at 100mbit. I still use it for testing.
I still keep a WRT54Gv3 around with DD-WRT because of devices that require WEP. (cough cough)
It’s really nice having it set up as a subnet with a ton of restrictions. Something it would be incapable of stock.
So this sounds like a bad thing then…
Like if having gpl code in free bsd forced all these companies to be more open with their software, and now they can be more closed with it, isn’t that bad?
It’s a mixed bag.
The major companies that use it, contribute back to it (think Netflix, Sony, Apple, etc). If they didn’t have a copyleft option, Sony and Apple would’ve built completely closed-source and wouldn’t be contributing to anything. Netflix is different in that GPL wouldn’t force them to disclose their modifications, they just preferred FreeBSD because of its networking stack, they would’ve probably just gone with Linux if FreeBSD didn’t exist.
It’s more of a symbolic thing. FreeBSD has removed the vast majority of gpl code over the last decades. I think this specific removal was just a last lingering overlap that was difficult to replace.
Is it bad? It’s subjective. The project goals were always to be permissive. There was just historical borrowing from other open source projects.
I think both approaches are valid. GPL has fostered a greater number of maintainers and volunteer participants. That’s definitely its shown strength but you can also attribute fragmentation to this. Whereas BSD has created much more focused and targeted distributions. I guess that’s indirectly due to the license and more the smaller group of active contributors.
It’s really difficult to rival FreeBSD at certain specific usecases. I wouldn’t use anything else for a NAS or a router.
It’s a very lopsided distro, bad gpu and wifi support. Limited application support. Really not ideal for a desktop, nor is it really meant to be used that way.
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.
Counterpoint: Apple used (uses?) a lot of GPL code as well, but their “giving back” was so perfunctory that the community didn’t incorporate most of it.
Big companies will always find ways to skirt what is allowed in ways that benefits them alone.
Yes, it’s bad. Permissive licensing (instead of copyleft) is for cucks.
No no I just like seeing my work get used without any care or contribution back to create systems that absolutely don’t care about the rights of the users too /s
Yes that’s probably bad
WRT54G were the best shit back then. So much choice with firmware, loved the Tomato firmware and its flexible QoS. Good times.
OpenWRT is still the best shit now.
I bought a linksys wrt simply because they had the open firmware. That router was amazing!
yeah I liked that bsd really kept to the unix style but license wise gpl is what I respect.
Agreed. I also want to learn more about micro kernels as well, which the BSDs use.I think we have a pretty interesting dynamic viewing the two different licensing schemes. Linux/gnu has been making some huge strides, whereas BSD is kind of just very slowly chugging along in niche areas. It does seem to be pretty damn good at the things it does, though. I honestly feel like the BSD license should be a better license because it gives more freedom, but with the existence of greed and capitalism GPL is required to get profit seekers (greedy bastards) to play nice.
Edit: I was wrong, got it mixed up with gnu Hurd when looking things up in the past
I honestly feel like the BSD license should be a better license because it gives more freedom
It does not. Saying the BSD license gives more freedom because it lets developers choose to close up the code is like saying the Confederacy gave more freedom because it let white people choose to own slaves.
I will add to the agreement. I wish gpl was not needed. I did not realize any bsds used micro kernels though.
Now you’ve got me questioning myself, never claimed to be an expert…
Edit: yep I’m wrong, a microkernel was developed, but looks like it eventually made it’s way to GNU Hurd and not really implemented into the BSDs. I recall coming across when looking into different OSs, I guess I got it mixed up.
I thought Microsoft pulled or rewrote the tcp/ip stack a while ago?
Even if they did (I think they did) it has to be compatible with when they did. So it undeniable BSD helped TCP/IP rule them all.
Windows have always had a shitty different net stack, if it’s based on BSD it’s truly amazing how they took a perfect thing and broke it.
You are very shrilly yourself. Plenty of companies have shown it isn’t hard to take GPL without contributed back. There are high odds you are using a chrome based browser to read this - did you know that is a GPL project because once upon a time it was khtml (from the KDE project), but the changes were never contributed back. Many embedded companies have their own fork of linux as well - their changes are all available as the GPL requires, but the changes won’t be accepted to the kernel as is and so the fact that they are available is useless.
Meanwhile there are many companies using FreeBSD who choose to contribute their changes back, just like some companies choose to contribute back to various GPL projects they use.
There are high odds you are using a chrome based browser to read this - did you know that is a GPL project because once upon a time it was khtml (from the KDE project), but the changes were never contributed back.
Chromium is what you’re ignoring here, and they are contributed back.
Many embedded companies have their own fork of linux as well - their changes are all available as the GPL requires, but the changes won’t be accepted to the kernel as is and so the fact that they are available is useless.
And that’s fine, if someone ever did want to pick it up, they could.
Meanwhile there are many companies using FreeBSD who choose to contribute their changes back.
I didn’t say there weren’t people/companies contributing to BSD. I am saying that since they aren’t required to, BSD isn’t getting the level of support it deserves. The companies contributing to GPL projects are required by law to release the source, so they might as well contribute to the project. I can guarantee there would be a lot less progress in linux/gnuland if releasing the source wasn’t required.
So your argument is that because there are some exceptions to a rule, the opposite of that rule is true.
Basically his argument is that because some companies choose to contribute back to BSD projects even though they aren’t required to, and because some GPL projects choose not to merge some changes from downstream forks, the GPL and BSD licenses are effectively the same. I think the flaw in this logic should be pretty apparent. I think the GPLv2 vs. GPLv3 debate is a lot more interesting, particularly since Linus has come out against GPLv3.
Another way to phrase that is that companies can choose to meaningulfully contribute back, or not, with either project, and there are plenty of examples of each combination.
No, you have failed to understand how either license works. Companies are forced to contribute back in the case of the GPL and the project can choose to accept that or not. In the case of the BSD license companies can choose whether to contribute back and if they do, then the project has the option to accept it or not. The GPL makes it always the choice of the project, while the BSD makes it always the choice of the company.
You have failed to understand the difference between idealism and practice. There are more companies that use Linux without ever contributing back than those that do. Those that do do so because it makes practical business sense to improve the upstream project they rely on. Any company that has decided they don’t want to share some code just builds it in a binary module, firmware, or application to sit on top.
Those are not exceptions.
The problem is that with GPL we can at least cherrypick the features and implement them ourselves, with BSD, everthing get closed and you get fucked
What do you mean “never contributed back”? All of these projects give their source code back, as the GPL requires.
The source is available but not in a form that will be accepted upstream. Often for good reason, but that doesn’t do you any good.
So? It’s not like upstream should have to accept everything every fork does.
What is the practical difference between code not accepted and code hidden?
You can look it and go “yeah, it is shit, but I see what it is doing, it is better done like this” and push that upstream. Saves time reverse engineering.
While someone can, in practice that doesn’t happen in most cases
The practical difference is that the code is there for whoever wants to use it.
Um, so yay for companies that have stolen open code and not contributed back? What even is your angle here?
In the end every licence is only as strong as your lawyers. And even if they don’t get merged into the main tree, their code being available is still a big win for users and devs alike
Creating a whole unix-like ecosystem without GNU has been the goal since LLVM launched.
Well there was a few before GNU came along. Including versions of UNIX itself. It’s just GNU was free, and then, because of contributions, became better. LLVM was originally something the emulation world was into. It meant your JIT could be cross platform. That how I encountered it. It became something for the permissive/coportates to fight GCC later. Having actual competition has made GCC better and it hasn’t lost to Clang/LLVM. The closed stuff didn’t really compete as much just lock people in so didn’t have to.
Unix-like?
pushoverOS has finally finished it’s transition to free repository for oligarchs.
