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.

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.

If freebsd was copyleft PlayStation would've never used it in the first place. Same as the BSD TCP/IP stack with windows.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

WRT54G were the best shit back then. So much choice with firmware, loved the Tomato firmware and its flexible QoS. Good times.

yeah I liked that bsd really kept to the unix style but license wise gpl is what I respect.