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Anything that’s not gpl-licensed is going to pull the rug from under your feet, people should have learned this by now.

Also, if you do open source contributions, never ever agree to assign copyright to the project: doing so means the project owners can relicense the code base, even towards proprietary license.



FreeBSD must be pulling a very long con, then.


Yeah.

I think project governance matters more than license, and the BSDs are great examples.

Having said that, I’ve soured on the GPL. V3 more-or-less bans companies from selling you hardware that runs free software, but lets Google, Meta, etc use the software to expand their cloud-based monopolies where surveillance capitalism and enshittification have won out.

AGPL or BSL seem much better if you want free as in freedom. BSD and Apache at least don’t force your software off of machines that end users control.

Yes, BSL is not open (TM) or free (TM) or whatever. It’s still better IMHO, since it at least has some path to revenue for the developers.


Are there AGPL or BSL success stories? (Ie. projects that started as such and became/remained sustainable?)


The whole Grafana ecosystem afaik. They are thriving as a company and they don’t risk amazon or some other company coming in and selling a forked version of their software (see redis/valkey, elasticsearch/opensearch, etc)


A little off-topic but a few companies (e.g. Aerospike) use AGPL in the free versions of their paid products to avoid getting leeched off.


Uh, yes?

Half of the initial mac os x kernel was ripped off freebsd, giving pretty much nothing back.

Afaik netapp is also basing their system on bsd.

Sony uses freebsd as the OS for their playstation.

And many more, giving essentially nothing back.


> Half of the initial mac os x kernel was ripped off freebsd, giving pretty much nothing back.

That is open source.

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU


You'll notice the FreeBSD folks don't seem to be particularly bothered by this. FreeBSD loses nothing to Apple or NetAPP.

This attitude of "OMG you're being ripped off" any time a company incorporates code from a BSD/MIT/whatever licensed project baffles me.


Regarding apple: They support cups and clang, and stuff like swift and webkit. Also, the darwin kernel is open source.

I’d be shocked if netapp hard forked bsd and doesn’t upstream fixes.


They support the version of cups that nobody uses anymore, except themselves.


ONTAP is a fork of BSD (dunno if they upstream or not) and NetApp are far from the only ones in the storage sector who have done this.


Absolutely. I signed one copyright assignment, ever, with the FSF. I trust them enough to do that, but they're just about the only ones.


They don't require it anymore.


Better yet.




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