You are wrong. I doubt I will change your mind.

1. There are many, many, many more companies using Linux without giving back than there are for BSD. And not just “using it” either. Practically the entire embedded universe is one giant GPL violation.

2. Linux is not “true” GPL anyway, so it is a poor example for how the GPL impacts success.

3. The companies that build businesses on FreeBSD tend to give back. There are many examples, the biggest being Netflix.

4. The classic example of a company not giving back is Sony and even that is wrong.

5. People choosing a BSD license value different things, rendering your entire premise meaningless for them and your framing of “the problem” inappropriate.

I do not want to get too deep into Sony. But let’s acknowledge that they first tried to ship Linux on PlayStation. They had to stop. Why? Well, it was not because people tried to copy the operating system. It was because people used it to circumvent other protections to copy proprietary games. The problem was not with Sony’s ethics but with those of “the community” and the lack of respect “the community” had for the concept of copyright.

So, Sony switched to a FreeBSD base and they no longer share that code. True.

However, Sony does contribute to BSD. And Sony is a significant contributor to Clang/LLVM and they do share their work freely (even though the license does not require them to). The FreeBSD project benefits from this as Clang is the system compiler. I benefit from this as my Linux distro also uses Clang as the system compiler.

The BSD license is “free software” and provides all “4 freedoms” touted by the FSF. It protects your rights with regards to the code you have and are using. It does not give you guaranteed access to FUTURE code that you do not write. Those future contributors are free to choose their license. You know…freedom.

BSD lags in features, particularly hardware support, because it has fewer users and therefore fewer developers. That is mostly an accident of history and not, in my view, due in any way to the license. Look up the BSD lawsuit that was happening when Linux appeared. If your argument for the popularity of Linux is the GPL, why did Xorg become the dominant window system instead of something GPL based? Why did Rust, Swift, and Zig appear on LLVM instead of GCC?

Anyway, I could write 100 paragraphs and not change your mind. You certainly have not changed mine.

It’s really just a difference of opinion. GPL enjoyers such as myself believe that Free software is the best and it should be kept free with a copyleft license. BSD license enjoyers also love Free software, but they believe in putting next to zero conditions on their software. They’re just happy if their freely released software is used to make anything better, even if it means proprietary projects incorporating it and not contributing.

Please tell me how BSD license can be good solution for operating system.

The code is still open, and the repos will still exist if a fork is created. Sony forks FreeBSD for PS6, and nothing happens to FreeBSD. It still exists, and it still works. The added bonus is not having to deal with Sony, or other people, trying to upstream stuff that doesn’t make sense outside of the PS environment and would have questionable value to others.

There are lots of ways companies get around the GPL, and most are GPL sanctioned.

Starting a company, use the GPL. Starting a project for fun, use whatever because the companies are going to steal it anyway if it’s good.

Companies are just taking BSD code and don’t contribute to it.

There isn’t a lot of evidence of this.

At the end they’re selecting Linux even if there’s licensing risk and they have contribute to code.

This is at odds with the first statement. Companies also aren’t contributing as much code as they should.

Also companies which want to support Linux don’t have to worry that someone would close their code or code they funded with money. It’s not about competition but collaboration.

Yeah, inertia is a thing. It’s why Windows is so dominant. The BSDs were rather competitive with Linux back in the early ‘90s - ‘00s.

This might have been a reason in the ‘90s IBM picked Linux as the Unix successor, but now it’s about inertia and a baseless OS is pretty handy.

It was also never about collaboration. It was always MAD doctrine. Each company had a pack of lawyers ready. The GPL isn’t the most battle tested.

GPL license allowed us also to sell own open-source solutions.

This isn’t the flex you think it is.

Instead of being ready to use solutions…

The BSDs are full operating systems. Batteries are included in the repo.

Linux requires adding lots of other software to make the kernel useful. When people say “It’s GNU/Linux”, this is what they mean. The Linux kernel + the GNU tools make an OS.

…they’re trying to be base for commercial closed-source products and it would be great as contributors could get something from that, but they get nothing.

They are not. They are existing as their own projects. ☺️

Most FOSS devs get nothing. 🤣 GPL, BSD, Apache… It doesn’t matter. The capitalists plunder the commons making money off of other’s hard work.

I understand that BSD see closed source as something cool and way to commercialize software,…

They really don’t. They just want to work on their projects in peace.

…but in today times where a lot of devices have 24/7 access to internet, microphones, cameras and at the same time to sensitive data it’s extremely dangerous. Closed source is used to hide backdoors, acts of surveillance and keeping monopoly on market which obviously stop evolution of software.

Ummm…. That’s not BSD specific. FOSS software gets used for this as well. All those surveillance devices are probably running some sort of Linux.

There are binary firmware blobs and all sorts of stuff. The Linux kernel is GPLv2 specifically to allow this.

The DMCA’s anti-encryption circumvention is used to chill software evolution and lock up code more than anything. BSDs only ask that people don’t GPL their stuff.

Companies play all sorts of games with code, and there isn’t a guarantee that what is in the repo is what people are running. We need reproducible builds to know the software is clean, and without that, software is not trustworthy.

This is bigger than the license on the code. This is about processes and culture.

FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are behind Linux.

Look, I dislike permissive licenses too, but you need a source to back this claim up.

Right now, each BSD does something special, that Linux (distro’s) can’t trivially replace, even if the usecase is more niche. NetBSD Dev’s make efforts to get it running on many devices as they can. OpenBSD (and it’s subprojects) are highly secure, moreso than Linux. Who do you think makes our beloved OpenSSH? OpenSSH noted for having very few vulnerabilities over it’s two decade long existence, and OpenBSD itself is similar, which is insane because there are products with multiple bad vulnerabilities every year (Linux being one of them…). This is due to a highly security minded architecture - one that Linux lacks.

FreeBSD is like Linux before systemd. I like systemd, but systemd is really trying to be kubernetes on a single node. I like systemd because I like kubernetes, but I understand why someone wouldn’t like it, and I question if “single node k8s” is the best architecture for a single server or personal desktop. The ports system results in freebsd packaging many server services that aren’t packaged on Linux. Being able to manage those through the system package manager, and the conviniences that provides, is nice.

Different, and not popular don’t mean bad.

Should probably be asked in an active BSD community if you want a real and well informed answer.

I understand that BSD see closed source as something cool

‘You understand’? Where did you get that idea?

The argument is not, and was never, that closed source is cool. The argument is that strong copyleft, while based on a noble goal, ends up hindering development: Here’s OpenBSD’s take on it. (CTRL+F for GPL).

This debate is about as old as the existence of free licenses. I doubt anyone will have anything new to say in this thread.

One aspect that isn’t raised very much is that for a company to maintain software (including their own fork of any software however licensed) costs developer time (= money). It may be cheaper to contribute back anyway, no matter the license, just in order to outsource that effort. If we are talking about software where this is true, companies have an incentive to work with the existing maintainers even if they aren’t legally obliged to.

Android has BSD-like permissive license. It’s open-source, but is also very very commercial. Google needed it to be open-source so phone manufacturers would adopt it, they all got burned on Windows Phone and Symbian and did not want another closed source OS that they could not modify for their specific hardware.

I agree, and in that same vein, Linux really should be AGPL as well.

There isn’t much sense in it at all.

This is the permissive vs copyleft debate. And it’s old as time. I suppose there’s a lot of nuance with licensing. If you’re a company at the receiving end, you probably love permissive licenses. They’re easy, offer the maximum amount of flexibility and freedom. It’s so short you probably don’t even need a team of lawyers… If you write software, it’s a bit more complicated. Do you want to cater to those people, make it as easy as possible to adopt your software? Then maybe consider BSD/Apache/MIT. Do you want to build a community, stop your competitors from just taking code? Want to try to ensure it stays open? Then maybe consider a copyleft license.

I sometimes don’t care. Write some stuff for me (as a hobby) but that’s my entire motivation. I don’t care what people do with the results of my weekend of effort. Never plan to hire a lawyer or bother with it in case something happrns with it. Or it’s just a pile of snippets. I’ll dump it for other people to use and release that either WTFPL or some other permissive license. People can do whatever they like with it. With the stuff I’m a bit more proud of, or I plan to return to, I’ll choose AGPL.

I suppose with operating systems, it’s a bit similar? I mean there is a community for both ideas. Seems there are people who like either of them. They’ll have slightly different ideology, tasks to accomplish and different goals.

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I mean as far as myself. I never got it. Im not really a developer but if im not being paid diretly for my work or building a business around it and keep the ip for myself. If im putting it out there I want to do share and share alike. Using bsd is great and im glad it exists but I would never put anything under the license myself if I was making the call.