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FreeBSD Just Removed The Last Of Its GPL-Licensed Code
(hackaday.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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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.