>>"This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago"
First, I'm extremely excited to see this announcement. FreeBSD is fantastic and extremely underrated.
Secondly though, isn't it sad to hear that in FreeBSD existence - this is the largest donation ever ... given that Yahoo use to run it's entire company on it, OS X is based on it, Juniper is based on it, Netflix deploys on it, NetApp, EMC, etc.
Side note: Tarsnap is listed at the same level as Juniper (2013) and VMware (2014); I have mixed feelings about that.
If you look at the donors listed in each category for 2008-2014 (why those years? Because that's what I scraped the website for) then Tarsnap comes after Anonymous (one or more people giving $250k+, $250k+, and $50k+), NetApp ($450k+), Cryptography Research ($250k+), Hudson River Trading ($250k+), Google ($180k+), LineRate ($150k+), NetFlix ($75k+), iXsystems ($70k+), Swisscom ($40k+), McAfee ($35k+), and John Baldwin ($30k+). And of course WhatsApp, who aren't on the donors list yet for some reason. Part of the reason that Tarsnap always looks like one of the largest donors is that Tarsnap's donation always arrives a few weeks into the new year, while other companies are faster and get their money in at the end of the previous year.
Not to say that Tarsnap doesn't contribute, of course; just that other companies contribute far more over the long run.
Sorry, I was afraid that remark would be misinterpreted.
As a long-time FreeBSD (and previous Tarsnap) user, I'm certainly appreciative of the fact that you donate to the Project (in addition to your other contributions). That's the "happy feeling".
The "disappointment feeling" comes from wishing that Juniper and VMware's donations were of an amount that would put them in a much higher category.
In other words, my thinking was along the lines of "These two [huge, public] companies are donating roughly as much as Colin himself is". (I realize that, technically, Tarsnap is the entity donating but the fact is that that would be extra money in your pocket otherwise.)
The "disappointment feeling" comes from wishing that Juniper and VMware's donations were of an amount that would put them in a much higher category.
Well, it would always be nice to see more and larger donations, but I wouldn't be too harsh on them. As far as I know, VMware doesn't use FreeBSD at all; and while Juniper certainly uses FreeBSD a great deal, they also contribute a lot of developer hours -- vastly more than I ever have.
An interesting bit of that is how small the cash donations are in absolute terms! Giant companies like NetApp and Google have now been out-donated by one individual person! A wealthy person, admittedly. But those companies' cumulative donations to the project over 7 years are surprisingly small, basically in the range of what you might expect one wealthy person to donate to a charity or university they support.
Given the cost of developers, perhaps that suggests that cash donations are not all that effective a method, and measuring contributions to FreeBSD is maybe better done in developer time? If you convert the donations to developer-years, companies like NetApp and Google have each donated an average of less than one developer per year over that period in the cash format. Surely there is some company that beats that threshold, if measured in developer-years?
An interesting bit of that is how small the cash donations are in absolute terms!
Keep in mind that those are lower bounds based on which "donation bracket" they fell into. I know there was at least one case where a company donated $200k (which fell into the $100-250k bracket).
measuring contributions to FreeBSD is maybe better done in developer time
Yes. But that's harder to measure, of course.
Also keep in mind that the FreeBSD Foundation != the FreeBSD Project; it is only in the past couple of years that the Foundation has had enough money to hire ongoing engineering staff. For a long time their budget went to project infrastructure and self-contained projects proposed by individual developers.
I don't know, NetApp has been a sponsor for as long as I can remember. If I were running the foundation, I'd probably be happy knowing every year I was getting over $100k from NetApp instead of a one-time thing. It's tough to budget off of one-off donations. Not that they'd complain, but you make it sound like none of those companies help at all.
Justin Gibbs of The FreeBSD Foundation has said exactly this, regular yearly donations are very important. The one time donations are great for building a war chest, but it is hard to forecast a cash flow without regular contribution.
Paying back into open source is part of Cost Of Good Sold, and companies that seem to have longevity are realizing this.
OSX is not based on it in the typical use of the word. Darwin is a hybrid that incorporates a lot from *BSD courtesy of its NeXtStep lineage. It doesn't use the FreeBSD kernel and it has a lot of Apple specific enhancements.
I think there's more to the relationship than you give credit for. Even FreeBSD's web pages list OSX as a descendant https://www.freebsd.org/projects/newbies.html and several man pages in osx list freebsd as origin for various facilities.
"Apple's Mac OS X is based in part on FreeBSD and includes a rich UNIX® foundation in addition to the proprietary Apple user interface"
And I am in no way dismissing the relationship. I am just pointing out that Darwin was based on NeXtStep but incorporates a LOT of *BSD technologies. I used OSX Beta 1 and it was pretty far from a FreeBSD based OS.
Agreed for sure! But it does look like additional FreeBSD stuff was added as nextstep turned into darwin/osx.
I found a couple of other articles, I didn't know Linus turned down the job offer from Steve Jobs before they hired that famous FreeBSD developer. It's funny to think how things might have turned out in an alternate reality :) http://www.wired.com/2013/08/jordan-hubbard/
It's also fascinating to try old versions of nextstep and rhapsody in virtual machines, you can really tell how osx traces straight back. Even the installer is so similar still, comparing nextstep 3 and yosemite (if you bring up the console window during its progress)
XNU really is a hybrid kernel. On the top level you see mostly FreeBSD which as you say brings in the VFS, networking, most of the userland and lots of other things you see in a POSIX conforming kernel. However, many things are actually nothing more than just shims down into the Mach part of the kernel, which brings the virtual memory, processes, thread model and other “low level” stuff. Processes for example can be worked with as if they were a FreeBSD flavoured process, but that will just call down into a shim which calls down into Mach. You can however also work with processes the Mach style, eg. through ports and mach_msg.
As an illustration, there was a program which would crash the system (kernel panic) by using Mach interfaces to create a new thread, and then have that thread use standard Unix interfaces. Apparently, the shims were not properly initialized.
I seem to remember OS X being based on BSD/386, part of the proof being a number of bugs in early OS X systems that had been fixed in BSD/386 before FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD forked. Almost as if OS X was fork that pre-dated the more famous distributions.
It was called Rhapsody then, and work had started on it even before the ink was dry on the NeXT acquisition.
The rebranding to OS X was largely cosmetic from the command-line userland and underlying OS architecture's points of view, despite what the tech media often claimed about it at the time. OS X ported "Carbon" Mac OS 9 APIs to the new operating system; the Rhapsody strategy was either "Yellow Box" (former OpenStep, now Cocoa) runtime, or run in an emulation environment.
If you read the commit messages you will often see a "Sponsored by:" line, and it's not uncommon to see those companies referenced, so they are supporting FreeBSD, just in the form of developer time. And I believe they also donate to the foundation as well.
Of those, only 9,244 commits [2] have the word "Sponsored" in their commit message; however, 3,486 were sponsored by "The FreeBSD Foundation" [3]. So only a net total of 5,758 commits were company sponsored.
Said another way, that means just 2.1% of all commits ever made to FreeBSD, in it's 21 year existence, were companies sponsoring and submitting patches.
So no, I think it's safe to say that FreeBSD is primarily run and operated by lone individuals who do it because they personally love FreeBSD.
OK, maybe "never" is a bit of a stretch. "Very rarely, even by people whom I knew were getting paid by their employers to spend 100% of their time working on FreeBSD"?
All commits are also not equal, just like not all LOC is equal. Very often I see folks with a lot of commit on github, when I look at the diff, it's 2 lines, 1 line. I'm the kind of person that will probably write 20 lines before I commit. I think companies are more likely to have done something bigger, tested it, used it for a while then committed, but individual developer could just commit on a line or two for say bug fixes. This is not to make an excuse for commercial entities, I still think they can do much more in helping projects, but if too much money flows into open source, it just will end up corrupting the community.
The sad reality is the most corporations are pure leechers, they never give anything back, for those companies open source is just a means of not paying for software.
I also have rarely seen much contributed back in my limited experience, especially outside of the "tech industry" proper. I've noticed the lack especially in "big engineering" (oil & gas, CAD, aeronautics, etc.), and recently also in "data toolkit" type markets like proprietary bioinformatics toolkits, data-mining toolkits, GIS packages, etc. I don't work there myself fwiw, but for various reasons have spent some time observing development practices. BSD-licensed code is included in tons of profitable proprietary products in those areas that have never contributed back a line to the original project. Much of the time they drag their feet on even giving any acknowledgment to the project they took the code from. Really they would prefer to pretend they invented it all themselves, 100% Custom Proprietary Solution, with no acknowledgement whatsoever. They do typically grudgingly make the legally required copyright acknowledgment, but in the "New BSD" variant of the BSD license that removed the traditional requirement for acknowledgment to be prominent, that's pretty easy to bury in fine print in the most obscure place you can concoct (a random .txt file on the install medium, or somewhere in the fine print at the end of a manual, are two popular options).
A plausible counterargument is that these types of companies wouldn't contribute back anyway: they just aren't interested. In that case the practical choice is between letting them free-ride off your code (BSD) or not letting them use it at all (GPL), because they aren't going to make a choice that involves contributing back, regardless of your license. In that case I can see people leaning towards BSD. But I'd personally lean towards GPL, because I think that, at least often, shutting these companies out of the ability to use open-source code would probably be a net win for society. But it's hard to prove that. And this probably depends significantly on your goals and the kind of software you write.
Like how Apple, Google, Intel, Nvidia etc. are exploiting the LLVM project? IMO, the need for GPL style restrictive licences isn't backed up by facts; more open licences encourage commercial use and open development.
There's a game I own that I'm only able to play on my computer because its developer accidentally used a GPLed audio library, and found their best course was to GPL the game engine. Internet volunteers then ported that engine to other platforms. So as an end user the GPL really has made things better for me than a BSD-style license would.
That doesn't do anything. Large corporations don't have to distribute your software for internal usage. It can reach hundreds of thousands of employees and still be internal.
In my experience companies just use other code or develop their own, so the original developer doesn't benefit directly anyway. So it doesn't matter which license he chooses.
One could argue that making a successful open source project makes the original developer "wanted" in terms of employment, paid support requests, paid consulting... And choosing leeching-friendly license helps in achieving that.
That is the express intent of the BSD/MIT license though. If the authors wanted to prevent people profiting from the software they would have released it under some other license.
Minor nerdrage here - the GPL says NOTHING about sale of source. It strictly is about release of source. You can sell systems with GPL in them for as much cash you desire to do. I've seen it done in extremely profitable situations, actually.
Roughly, look at any mobile software you use and look at the open source licenses. Note how much of that code gets pushed back into the rest of the world. For even more excitement, look at major non-tech companies and see how much they contribute back. In my idle memories, I think Walmart might be the only one I've personally seen... The GPL (or its stronger and younger sibling, the AGPL), contractually require release of source to the user.
When working for these companies, have you ever asked if you could contribute back? In the field of pharma, a lot of contributors to RDKit discovered that no one had ever asked before. It now has a lot of contributions from people who work in industry.
And don't fool yourself that GPL means companies cannot use it or include it in their products. Many do, even following the letter and spirit license agreement. As a quick example, OpenEye released openbabel under GPL; now their biggest competitor, Schrodinger, uses openbabel in products with the modifications released as a fork on github where the product is developed[1].
I've asked a couple of different employers whether I can release something as GPL. The answer has usually been "yeah, sure, just let me check with legal first". Months go by, I ask again, and I'm told "yeah, we'll get right on that". Never an outright no, just stalling until I gave up.
(Current employer has been better, and I've submitted a few improvements to libraries I use)
As I noted it's hard to prove, and sensitive to a lot of assumptions (not least, what kind of software we're talking about). I also don't know the entire range of businesses using BSD software without contributing back. It's possible some of them are friendly cuddly ones. :-)
Two guesses, though. 1. To a significant extent it's just reducing the cost structure of BigCorp IT spending, which [note: unproven] in most cases I suspect mainly benefits profit margins and capital investors, though it may to some extent benefit others as well. 2. A significant proportion of these products are backed by corporations who are aggressive users of the copyright and patent systems. The flipside of the developer freedom of the BSD license is that it leaves the developer full freedom to restrict the freedom of users by suing users who dare modify, reverse-engineer, or produce software similar to the software the company produces. The GPL, particularly GPLv3 with its patent clause, complicates the ability of a company to incorporate my software into code they plan wield as a weapon in IP lawsuits, whereas they can roll BSD-licensed code into their legal weapons mostly unhindered.
I'm not asking about proof, I am asking about your personal subjective opinion. Your post doesn't appear to address the question at all, it appears to be justifications for why you want to "punish" corporate software companies. I want to know how do you think preventing people from using free software benefits society at large?
Also, your post contains a very common myth: "the BSD license is that it leaves the developer full freedom to restrict the freedom of users". It does no such thing. The only thing the BSD license restricts is your ability to use the code without including the license like it says.
I thought that was what I was answering. Imo it's harmful for society at large because: 1. all else equal, helping to shift the proportion of returns that go to capital vs. labor is negative for society; and 2. assisting companies in building products that they will use as a basis for IP lawsuits is negative for society.
Also: you've simply restated my "myth" to say something that to me seems equivalent. The BSD license allows companies to take my code, and build it into software packages which they subsequently use as a basis for patent and copyright lawsuits. That is, one "freedom" the BSD license does not restrict is a developer's "freedom" to file copyright and patent lawsuits against users of the software. I do not believe that is a valuable freedom, and do not want to assist with that behavior. I am fine with people using my code to build other products, as long as they agree not to sue downstream users for violating their patents, violating the DMCA, and similar things. The GPL is an imperfect hack to try to meet that criteria, but imo it's often better than nothing.
It is possible they could do all that without my assistance anyway, of course. They could build things entirely from scratch and then sue users of the software. But I don't want to help make it easier.
But your very first words clearly state otherwise: "As I noted it's hard to prove".
>Imo it's harmful for society at large because: 1. all else equal, helping to shift the proportion of returns that go to capital vs. labor is negative for society; and 2. assisting companies in building products that they will use as a basis for IP lawsuits is negative for society.
This does not answer the question, it simply makes more. Why do you think those things are negative for society. And why do you think they are related to the question at hand, much less a direct result of the use of free software?
>you've simply restated my "myth" to say something that to me seems equivalent
No. You restated it. I did nothing of the sort.
>The BSD license allows companies to take my code, and build it into software packages which they subsequently use as a basis for patent and copyright lawsuits
So does the GPL. You are very mistaken if you believe that free software can remove people's right to sue others. Both in the sense that you can not remove people's right to sue and in the sense that if you could, that would not be free in any sense of the word.
>That is, one "freedom" the BSD license does not restrict is a developer's "freedom" to file copyright and patent lawsuits against users of the software.
There is no "developer" vs "user". They are the same thing. That is one of the fundamental facts the GPL was conceived on. You are creating a non-existent category of people who you feel should not have freedoms. Neither the BSD license or its cousins (MIT, ISC, etc) nor the GPL in any version makes any such arbitrary distinction between "developers" and "users".
>The GPL is an imperfect hack to try to meet that criteria
No it is not. You are both grossly misrepresenting the GPL, and attacking free software. This behavior is expected from people who oppose free software, it is appalling from people who purport to support it.
>They could build things entirely from scratch and then sue users of the software. But I don't want to help make it easier.
This only explains why you choose to not write free software. That is not what I asked about. I would like to know why you think free software is a negative for society. How did society lose out by apple using free software in its operating system? How did society lose out by the billions of devices out there running openssh?
Your post is rather rambling and hyperbolic, so I'll stick to just the part about free software and users.
I suggest reading the FSF's explanation of why the GPL exists. One of the reasons is: because free software means that downstream users have the right to use and modify software. That is a freedom. The right to keep other people from using and modifying software is, by contrast, not a legitimate freedom. Invoking copyright and patent law are two common ways people attempt to use the legal system to restrict other people's use of their own computers.
The GPL attempts to disarm such attack routes by requiring you to pass on, to all subsequent downstream users, the same right to use and modify the software that you yourself received. The BSD license by contrast, allows you to sue downstream users who modify the software for copyright infringement, because you didn't grant them a license. For example, OSX is built on FreeBSD, which is free software. But because it's BSD-licensed, Apple can prohibit me from distributing modified versions of OSX, and can invoke the DMCA to prevent me from reverse-engineering it in certain ways. That's a "freedom" the BSD license allows Apple to retain, to use the power of the state to restrict my freedom.
My post is very direct and clear, and contains absolutely no hyperbole. Rather than make up nonsense to try to dismiss what I said, if you feel you can not respond without further embarrassing yourself then simply opt not to. The fact that you have yet to answer my very simple direct question, and instead want to try to weasel more FUD against free software in is quite telling. But now I have a new question. Since BSD licensed code is so bad for society, I assume you don't use openssh, or X Windows, or apache, or nginx, or any of the other massively important BSD licensed software millions of people benefit from?
>I suggest reading the FSF's explanation of why the GPL exists.
I suggest you try to be less condescending when trying to convince people to buy into your lies.
>The right to keep other people from using and modifying software is, by contrast, not a legitimate freedom.
Words have meaning. They still have the meaning even if you do not like it. Freedom means freedom. Not "only freedoms I approve of". Your statement is every bit as absurd as people claiming the freedom to prevent others from entering your home is not a "legitimate freedom".
>The GPL attempts to disarm such attack routes by requiring you to pass on, to all subsequent downstream users, the same right to use and modify the software that you yourself received
No, it passes down an obligation, not a right. Not a freedom.
>The BSD license by contrast, allows you to sue downstream users who modify the software for copyright infringement
No, the BSD license does not prevent you from suing people who modify your code. You have no ability to sue people for modifying the BSD licensed code. You are resorting to the oldest and most obviously incorrect FUD technique, one which even RMS has requested GPL fanatics refrain from repeating. My code that uses BSD licensed code is not the BSD licensed code I used. Nothing done to my code has any effect on the BSD licensed code. It can not be "made closed" or any such nonsense.
>But because it's BSD-licensed, Apple can prohibit me from distributing modified versions of OSX, and can invoke the DMCA to prevent me from reverse-engineering it in certain ways.
That would still be true if they did not use BSD licensed code. That's the point. Nothing is lost here. The only thing that changed is instead of apple writing code, they used existing code which due to age and examination is almost certainly of higher quality than anything apple could have produced in such a short time span. So users of apple software got better software, and nobody lost out on anything. Hardly seems a negative to society.
>That's a "freedom" the BSD license allows Apple to retain, to use the power of the state to restrict my freedom.
Apple is not restricting your freedom. The government is, via copyright law. You feel so entitled to other people's work that you conflate "someone did not grant me additional rights above and beyond those I already have" with "someone is restricting my freedom".
> Apple is not restricting your freedom. The government is, via copyright law.
When a person or company makes use of a legal process to restrict someone's freedom, I think it's fair to blame both the law and the person using it. You don't get a free pass on unethical actions just because they are currently legal in a particular jurisdiction.
> You feel so entitled to other people's work
I feel entitled only to freedom to use my own personal property without restriction. If I purchase a computer, I own it and can do whatever I want with it. If I buy a MacBook Pro, I can legitimately open it up, modify it, replace components, modify the installed operating system or software, etc., etc. I can also share photographs, schematics, disassemblies, and anything else I want to document this process. It's my computer. If you, Apple, or anyone else tries to get the government to stop me from doing so, you are in the wrong, even if you try to dress up your intrusion on my personal property with made-up terms like "intellectual property", EULAs, and whatever other bullshit they come up with.
I do think it would be preferable to simply repeal "intellectual property" laws rather than have to try to use things like the GPL to work around them. In that world, the BSD license would be fully free, too. But licensing software as GPL is something I can do easily as an individual, while getting stupid laws repealed is considerably more difficult, so it's the pragmatic workaround for now.
>When a person or company makes use of a legal process to restrict someone's freedom, I think it's fair to blame both the law and the person using it
They are not. You are still pretending things are backwards. They are not doing anything to you, they are simply not giving you privileges.
>You don't get a free pass on unethical actions
You have not made an argument to support the notion that "selling software" is an unethical action.
>If I purchase a computer, I own it and can do whatever I want with it. If I buy a MacBook Pro, I can legitimately open it up, modify it, replace components, modify the installed operating system or software, etc., etc. I can also share photographs, schematics, disassemblies, and anything else I want to document this process. It's my computer.
None of that is even remotely relevant. You are free to do those things. They have nothing to do with BSD licensed software. It is hard to see your red herrings get further and further from any sense of relevancy and still believe you are not being deliberately dishonest.
>I do think it would be preferable to simply repeal "intellectual property" laws rather than have to try to use things like the GPL to work around them
The GPL does not work around them. The GPL requires copyright law to achieve its impositions. Without copyright law, people would simply not give you the source and there would be nothing you could do about it.
Apple is doing far more than simply not giving me the source. I'd be fine with that. I have no problem simply disassembling the binaries that are on my Macbook, modifying them as I please, and distributing my new versions. I don't need source code to do that. I've already purchased a computer, which means that I own the computer and what's inside of it. That's all I claim ownership of. But I can't legally modify the binaries on my computer, because Apple claims some fairy-tale "intellectual property" right to prohibit me from distributing binaries which are "derived from" their binaries in some weird viral sense. I don't think that is justified.
Again, nothing you said has anything to do with the BSD license. You are demonstrating precisely why the huge backlash against the GPL is getting so big. If you want the GPL to maintain relevance, stop attacking free software with lies and FUD. You just keep driving more and more people away from the GPL.
WebKit, llvm, are pretty important in that they altered the fundamental of present day by being so openly used. It's apples ehm to oranges at that level, but what has Google contributes of the likes?
Android sadly is not OSS, just like OSX isn't, even though it's obviously based on it. Chromium was V8 and WebKit, and so depended on WebKit. The rest are obviously not fundamental pieces of technology.
Apple did the absolute minimum with WebKit source (occasional tarball dumps) until a KHTML developer's rant shamed them into being a bit better. LLVM has become a valuable project but I think mostly by luck; Apple contributed some funding to it because they didn't want to make the patent promises they would need to to distribute GCC. Neither of these is a new project that was developed by Apple and then released, in contrast to mda's list.
Easy. Android (Open Source, while the source is not always released right after a new version is out), running on most Smartphones over the world. Pretty big contribution I'd say, especially in a world turning Mobile-First. Chromium. Go. I'd say their contributions are far from negligible.
Yahoo was the poster child of FreeBSD usage, but a few years ago they moved their servers to linux.
There was public bits of info here and there at the time, but there's not much left online it seems.
It's a bit of a catch 22 situation though: if mega-corps did contribute large amounts to the project, there would be suspicions raised that they are "influencing" the project. There is often an expression of disappointment when people learn that Google is a significant donor for Mozilla.
If you run a mega-corp and are interested in donating to FreeBSD, please go right ahead. We can figure out how to deal with suspicions about influence later. ;-)
Personally, I do not believe that money magically makes software better. Some of the best code I have ever seen was written by "academics" who received little to nothing for writing it.
The OS X userland and some other parts are derived from FreeBSD. One of the project initiators (Jordan Hubbard[1]) went to Apple and ported it for the initial version of OS X. He now left.
> The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features.
#mediaviewer/File:Unix_timeline.en.svg){kind=link}
>>"This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago"
First, I'm extremely excited to see this announcement. FreeBSD is fantastic and extremely underrated.
Secondly though, isn't it sad to hear that in FreeBSD existence - this is the largest donation ever ... given that Yahoo use to run it's entire company on it, OS X is based on it, Juniper is based on it, Netflix deploys on it, NetApp, EMC, etc.
Edit: typo