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BSDI + FreeBSD article
Joey the Lemur writes "I saw this article over at Yahoo! about the BSDI/Walnut Creek merger that has some good points concerning FreeBSD and Apple. The author talks about Apple's proposal to stay synced with FreeBSD (Darwin), and why they should actually follow through with it. It also has some good commentary on why BSD isn't as prominent as Linux. "
This, IMHO, is why the BSD license actually does work. I see a lot of GPL proponents saying things like, "Gee, some nasty evil organization could come in and steal all of our hard work and not give back if we release our code under a BSD-style license." Yes, this is true, and at face value seems pretty severe. But consider the amount of effort that a company has to expend to keep a non-trivial piece of software moving forward. It costs a lot of money to pay good programmers, who are getting harder and harder to find these days. This is made even more difficult if the company wants to take the software in many different directions (e.g., in the case of an operating system, they want to develop multimedia tools for it along with network tools along with any number of other hot topics in today's market). Contrast this with the fact that if the company doesn't fork their software project from the original source code, they get tons of people developing the software and adding new gizmos to it completely for free. No sane company (at least, one that understands what the hell they are doing) is going to trivially fork a major piece of software and throw away all of those potential helping hands.
This is why I favor the BSD style license. It lets companies who really feel that they need to fork and keep proprietary their intellectual investment in a piece of software do so. But, smart companies won't fork unless they really have a good reason.