this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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In my opinion, I just don't understand permissive licenses. For example, with FreeBSD's license, companies can essentially "steal" the hard-earned efforts and use them to enrich themselves. For example, FreeBSD could have been a gaming OS, as the PlayStation's OS is FreeBSD. However, they didn't give anything back to the community.
Copyleft licenses, on the other hand, require companies to contribute any changes they make to the code back to the community so that it benefits the community as a whole. In this case, there's no "stealing", companies need to respect the community's efforts by giving back.
That's my two cents anyway.
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.