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It is not unfair, because the majority of "developers contributing to it" are on those company payrolls, 8h a day during a full week.

It would be just another BSD or Minix if it would be only university students and weekend coders working on it, and we would all keep using Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, Tru64, Ultrix....

As for security issues, it helps that Linus is against disclosing security bugs as such.



> It is not unfair, because the majority of "developers contributing to it" are on those company payrolls, 8h a day during a full week.

This is overwhelmingly true now, but it wasn't always.


Which is the reason why Linux moved beyond yet another UNIX clone hobby project.

I still remember how it was when I was getting distributions via Walnut Creek CDROMs.

As per Wikipedia, IBM, Compaq and Oracle started contributing in some form around 1998.

I guess we could look at commits history to see when IBM and friends actually started to provide features.


> It is not unfair, because the majority of "developers contributing to it" are on those company payrolls, 8h a day during a full week. Why don't the devs at those company contribute to BSD then? Care to reflect on this?


MIT license, they don't need to.

How much code do you think they got back from Sony, Apple, companies selling routers with BSD on them?

Even Google prefers to build their own OS from scratch with MIT license (Fuchsia) than keep on using Linux for that effort. They already reduced GPL use to the bare minimum on Android by removing gcc.

Then there was the whole suit which made most companies loose interest to be involved with BSD.


FreeBSD uses BSD License, no? Or am I missing something here? https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license.html


BSD and MIT licenses are almost interchangeable regarding requirements to the code.

They even appear as MIT/BSD in many projects.


Citations/Examples, please? I always thought these are different.


Simple Google search.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/217/what-are-...

Relevant part:

"o what both the 2-clause BSD license and the MIT license have in common are:

    Permits use
    Permits redistribution
    Permits redistribution with modification
    Provision to retain the copyright notice and warranty disclaimer
In addition the MIT license also explicitly allows:

    merging
    publishing
    sublicensing
    selling
However, all these freedoms are implied by the BSD license, because all these activities can be considered "use" and/or "redistribution" of the software.

The practical differences between the 2-clause BSD license and the MIT license are marginal. Which one to pick is mostly up to personal taste. Especially considering that both licenses are considered compatible, so you can take code under one license and use it in a project under the other, as long as you keep the license text around."

Yocto has files with such dual license.

https://git.congatec.com/yocto/meta-openembedded/blob/fido/m...




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