this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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FreeBSD Just Removed The Last Of Its GPL-Licensed Code (hackaday.com)
submitted 1 month ago by 0x0@lemmy.zip to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] cenzorrll@piefed.ca 172 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (47 children)

The upshot of the BSD-license in the case of FreeBSD is that it has found it and its components used in many commercial products, including MacOS/OS X, the PlayStation’s Orbis OS, and of course the BSD networking stack is happily used in Windows, macOS and just about anywhere else. Meanwhile the GPL forced Linksys to open the firmware to its WRT54G series of routers, ultimately leading to the development of OpenWrt and similar projects.

They make it sound like the *WRTs were the worst thing to happen to consumer networking and that corporations not being required to contribute back to projects has made BSD stronger, rather than given companies free labor. I find the *BSDs to be pretty interesting, but let's not pretend that they're benefiting from companies using their work. Very shilly tone to this article.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 month ago

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.

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