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FreeBSD Project Falls Short of Year End Funding Target By Nearly 50%

Posted by samzenpus on from the half-empty dept.

TrueSatan writes "Perhaps a sign of our troubled times or a sign that FreeBSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs: the FreeBSD project has sought $500,000 by year end to allow it to continue to offer to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. But with the end of this year fast approaching, it has raised just over $280,000, far short of its target."

49 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Finally.... by identity0 · · Score: 2, Funny

    After many long years on Slashdot, can I be the first one to actually confirm that FreeBSD is dead?

    1. Re:Finally.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      No. Only Netcraft is allowed to do that.

    2. Re:Finally.... by Kergan · · Score: 4, Funny

      It's. Not. Dead. Yet.

      It'll return as a zombie... process?

    3. Re:Finally.... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

      See the donors page for some of the big donors. NetApp gave $100,000 this year (they had to invent a new category of sponsor for them. Juniper gave somewhere in the $10-25K region, but they've also started pushing a lot of code upstream and employing people to work full-time on FreeBSD, which is more valuable (in terms of code, Juniper has contributed more than all of the Foundation-funded developers in the past year, the advantage of the Foundation is that it can fund work that doesn't give anyone enough a short-term commercial advantage for companies to do it).

      To put this in perspective, last year's fund raising total was $400K and they raised about $480K. For the past two years, about half of the fund raising has been in the last week as US companies realise that it's the end of the tax year and they want to offset some tax, so they're pretty well on target.

      Actually, the biggest problem for the Foundation currently is the opposite of what you elude to. They need to have a certain (somewhat flexible) percentage of donations from individuals to satisfy the 'broad public support' requirement for their tax-free status. This means that they need small donations from individuals as well as the big corporate donations.

      P.S. The Foundation has received over 400 donations in between this story appearing and when I started writing this post. More, of course, are welcome. If you're having trouble figuring out how (apparently some people are), then go to the Foundation's donations page (reachable by clicking on Donations from the Foundation's front page, but depressingly hard to find from FreeBSD.org).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. Re:Obligatory by cheesybagel · · Score: 5, Funny

    Perhaps they should ask Apple to fund them. Good luck.

  3. Never met anyone who uses it. by jfdavis668 · · Score: 2

    I have never met anyone in person who uses it. I know some must.

    1. Re:Never met anyone who uses it. by Melkman · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well, I know people who use FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. I think the thought behind the BSD license is telling. It basically says you can take the code and nothing in return is expected, which is exactly what they get.

    2. Re:Never met anyone who uses it. by Cinder6 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Obviously you've never met me (well, most likely you haven't), but I used to use FreeBSD in the early-to-mid-2000s, back before I went to OS X. I always liked it a lot--more than any of the *nixes I used, with the possible exception of Arch.

      --
      If you can't convince them, convict them.
    3. Re:Never met anyone who uses it. by jfdavis668 · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, I don't think I ever met you. Nice to meet you.

    4. Re:Never met anyone who uses it. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      FreeBSD was very popular 10 years ago. In my opinion those were its golden days.

      BSD Unix golden days were 4.2 - 4.4 where TCP/IP was developed back in the early 1980s and Sun's Gossling worked on the kernel. Its freeBSD counterpart golden days were 4.0 - 4.12 before it went to shit and Linux/Ubuntu took over.

      10 years ago FreeBSD was ahead of Linux and it drove me nuts to see slashdot down all the time (not so common now) as Linux couldn't scale for more than 2 cpus and crashed or halted when it had a shitload of network connections. FreeBSD could run smoothly on that old 486 just fine for thousands of connections!

      FreeBSD was more user friendly (4.x and earlier) as you could go to /usr/ports/examples/cvsup and /etc and edit .sh files to do all sorts of crazy things like check your main update servers at 3am every night and sync to the ports ... just uncomment this line! FYI I last used it in 2004/2005 so I might have got that directory wrong. Linux .RC scripts are more like programs iwth if/else code than .ini files :-(

      You can't really hack them as they are programs. Not things to turn on and off as easily.

      Unix geeks used Linux and FreeBSD and if you bought it at any college bookstore it had a nice manual too which is my favorite unix book. It discusses how to use emacs and vi and other things much better than the crappy linux manpages. Infact, FreeBSD has /etc/share/doc with much more detailed things and its man pages were more detailed. Example man /etc would talk about that directory where no such entry was in Linux.

      FreeBSD 4.0 - 4.12 will always have a place in my heart right there with the Windows fan boys loving XP as its golden age.

      Today Linux has suceeded it and can now scale to 64 processors. Linux has a journaling file system now. It can do async i/o and other things that only FreeBSD could as FreeBSD became bloated and buggy. Rest in peace.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    5. Re:Never met anyone who uses it. by BrokenHalo · · Score: 2

      Example man /etc would talk about that directory where no such entry was in Linux.

      Maybe it just isn't necessary. Even BSDs get some things completely wrong:

      $ man woman
      No manual entry for woman
      $

    6. Re:Never met anyone who uses it. by Beetjebrak · · Score: 3, Interesting

      FreeBSD? Right here on my laptop, my media center, my personal web and mail servers, and a hell of a lot of servers (est. 400 or so) at work. But we probably haven't met. If we have, I generally don't use my preference for FreeBSD as a conversation starter.

      --
      Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
    7. Re:Never met anyone who uses it. by 1s44c · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well, I know people who use FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. I think the thought behind the BSD license is telling. It basically says you can take the code and nothing in return is expected, which is exactly what they get.

      I know from personal experience that at least some big mega-corps do give stuff back to the BSD's.

      I worked at a place that spent loads of money improving one of the BSDs. They gave back everything for the purely selfish reason that they could either keep maintaining their changes at a high cost or send the changes to the project and get maintance for free. The improvements to the BSD were publicly known but who funded them never was.

    8. Re:Never met anyone who uses it. by 1s44c · · Score: 2

      I use it *without* knowing on my router http://www.pfsense.org/ and my NAS http://www.freenas.org/

      Pendantic mode - How do you know you use it without knowing? Besides the boot messages are a dead giveaway.

      I used to use pfsense. It worked fine but it did seem annoyingly limited in some respects and everytime I asked how to do a thing I was told I should pay for a bounty to add some feature in the next release. It annoyed me so much I changed to OpenBSD and now write pf rules in vi. Now I know exactly what my firewall is doing, it runs a more recent version of pf, I have way more flexibility to do other things on my firewall if I choose, and pfsense can't compete with OpenBSD's security history.

    9. Re:Never met anyone who uses it. by m6tt · · Score: 2

      I use it all the time. I also use Linux variants.

      FreeBSD is really a powerful, well-documented system that brings a lot of stuff to the table that's not possible, not production ready, or simply broken in Linux.

      Off the top of my head: standardized networking commands, ZFS (in kernel), GEOM framework, devd, pf firewall is huge, RAID trim support, lagg (link aggregation/hot failover) and CARP (common address redundancy protocol...share IP for multiple servers).

    10. Re:Never met anyone who uses it. by imp · · Score: 4, Informative

      Having worked on FreeNAS and its commercial counterpart, I can tell you that iX Systems, the folks behind FreeNAS, give quite a lot back to FreeBSD. There is much code flowing back into the project from them, they sponsor many FreeBSD developers to attend various events, they leverage their buying power to get cheap/free servers for the project.

      Juniper Networks did a port of FreeBSD to mips, and contributed it back, as well as substantial support for different arm and PowerPC platforms.

      Yahoo has contributed many things back to the project over the years.

      And the lest goes on and on. There is a mutually beneficial relationship between the community, the corporations that use it and the project. To speak otherwise shows a woeful ignorance of reality.

  4. Obligatry Response with slight disgust by tuppe666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs

    Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.

    ...and that does not refute the point. Mac OS took code one way; the main developers...and gave out free laptops to the others. Its an example how the spirit of sharing from BSD is not as strong as having a license enforce it. When a company gets involved with Linux the ecosystem gets stronger...not sort of meander into obscurity [and no throwing money it at in a PR stunt is not the answer]. The only sick thing is the amount of Apple users promoting BSD.

    1. Re:Obligatry Response with slight disgust by Pieroxy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs

      Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.

      ...and that does not refute the point. Mac OS took code one way; the main developers...and gave out free laptops to the others. Its an example how the spirit of sharing from BSD is not as strong as having a license enforce it. When a company gets involved with Linux the ecosystem gets stronger...not sort of meander into obscurity [and no throwing money it at in a PR stunt is not the answer]. The only sick thing is the amount of Apple users promoting BSD.

      Emphasis mine. That's only your definition of strong. Have you considered the fact that maybe, just maybe, some people might not have the same definition as yours?

      --
      Write boring code, not shiny code!
    2. Re:Obligatry Response with slight disgust by PhamNguyen · · Score: 2

      You are missing an important point, which is that the main developers willingly went to work for Apple. Since they though this was advantageious, this implies that when they started out the project, the possibility of this happening would also have counted as a plus in their eyes. So this possibility presumably helped motivate people to become the main developers for BSD in the first place. tl;dr you can't say "contribute to open source - it might get you a lucrative job" and "don't steal open source developers" at the same time.

  5. Is this newsworthy? by butlerm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time? Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?

    1. Re:Is this newsworthy? by Kjella · · Score: 4, Interesting

      My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time? Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?

      Last year their target was $400k and they reached $426k so they're not intentionally making too ambitious targets. That this is an annual campaign and they're $146k short of matching last year indicates interest has dropped significantly. Looking at their donors it's now practically run by Netapp that's moved up to double platinum ($100k+), accounting for more than a third of their total donations. The more disturbing part for them should be that the donor list is much, much shorter than last year.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    2. Re:Is this newsworthy? by stephanruby · · Score: 4, Informative

      Also considering that the year is not over yet, and that a third of the money usually gets raised during the last month of the year, I'd say their fundraising effort is still going pretty smoothly.

      For 2011, we set a fundraising goal of $400,000 with a spending budget of $350,000. As of this publication we have raised $210,000. By this time last year, we had raised $195,000, but ended the year raising a total of $325,000. We are hoping that you, the FreeBSD community, will help us finish the year strong by making a donation this month. http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2011Dec-newsletter.shtml#Fundraising

      Who wants to bet that this year, they'll have fundraised $400,000 by the deadline, and that for next year -- they'll raise the target to $650,000.

    3. Re:Is this newsworthy? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

      My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time?

      Actually, the FreeBSD Foundation has never missed a funding target and, given late donations in previous years and unannounced pledges by a few companies looks like it should meet it this year too (which is nice, as it's 25% higher than the goal for last year).

      Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?

      No. The project lasted for a long time without the Foundation and could continue to do so. The Foundation does a number of useful things for the project, however. They have a lawyer, who can field tedious questions. They sponsor travel for unfunded developers to BSD conferences (and sometimes sponsor the conferences). Perhaps most importantly, they also fund work that everyone wants done but no one wants to do. For example, they funded the Intel GPU / GEM / KMS work, which is tedious work that no one wants to do, not in the commercial interests of any big FreeBSD users, but very useful for a lot of end users.

      They also do an increasing amount of matched-funding work, where a commercial user pays for half of the work and the Foundation matches it. In a few cases, they also provide a matchmaking service, where two or more companies can each part-fund the work, but between them completely fund it. This is arguably the most useful thing that they do, because it's the core idea behind open source: that it's cheaper to cooperate than to work independently.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  6. Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD... by urbanriot · · Score: 5, Informative

    Since we made the switch to FreeBSD in 2004, providing various services such as proxying web usage or web access logging for corporations, we've never even considered another OS as it's been a rock solid performer. Thousands of users in various locations are relying on our systems and despite inept people accidentally unplugging some of them, failed UPS', failed hard drives, they ruggedly truck on without issue.

    Hopefully the front page posting will encourage other FreeBSD users to donate. There's certainly more servers in production, especially some of the more reliable ones, that are using FreeBSD according to Netcraft.

    1. Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      I never recommend compiling from source in 2012!

      SOmething complex with lots of dependencies are just going to cause problems as who the hell knows what .config files will change and crap being spewed all over the file system.

      The official ports patch everything and it has to pass the FreeBSD QA and integrates with it well into the system. .deb files are similiar

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
  7. Not to late by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You know it is not too late to chip in. Fortunately 2012 isn't over yet.

  8. Re:Obligatory by _Stryker · · Score: 4, Informative

    You mean a link like this one: http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1082/

  9. Reallocate and re-prioritize. by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...the FreeBSD project has sought $500,000 by year end to allow it to continue to offer to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers.

    Hmm...

    • manage projects: YES
    • sponsor FreeBSD events: NO
    • sponsor Developer Summits: NO
    • provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers: NO

    Problem solved.

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  10. Re:Obligatory by OzPeter · · Score: 3, Funny

    *whoooosh*

    Why can't you just check apples web site for your self? Moron?

    --
    I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
  11. FBSD opportunities by unixisc · · Score: 2

    Technically, FBSD seems to have done a fine job, but they need to be more proactive in proliferating the market. For one, they could partner w/ server manufacturers of various platforms. One that comes straight to mind is HP w/ the Itanium, and here, FBSD's only competition would be Debian and HP/UX. Given all the OSs that have abandoned the platform, this is one golden opportunity for FBSD. Others would be to get into the AVL of major server manufacturers, be it HP, Dell, IBM and so on.

    The other thing FBSD can do is try selling itself against Linux. Here, they can adapt a 2 pronged strategy - offer FBSD to any server vendor considering Linux as a server, and offer other alternatives, based on the target applications. If it requires good SMP support or a special file system, consider DragonFly BSD. If it's for routers and firewalls, promote pFsense or m0n0wall. If it's for desktop or laptop use, promote PC-BSD. If it is for embedded applications, consider Minix, or maybe one of the other BSDs. The main marketing strategies should focus on all technical advantages of FBSD and FBSD based distros over Linux based distros. Things like backwards compatibility, stable APIs and ABIs, and so on. Use the licensing advantage only as icing on the cake. While some Linux shops may be dug in, others may be more open to such alternatives.

    One thing I wonder - if FBSD, heaven forbid, goes under, what would be the effect on all the other projects - pFsense, m0n0wall, PC-BSD, et al? Will they automatically fold, or will they just be forks from 9.1? I do think a less onerous alternative to GPL is needed, which is why I'd hate to see BSD go under.

  12. Accepting Donations: They're doing it wrong by Zenin · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.freebsd.org/donations/

    Great start! The home page has a Donate link at the top, it takes you to a clear, simple URL.

    Then it all falls apart...

    95% of the page is about everything other then cash donations. The simple PayPal Donate button? No where to be found. The Network For Good Donate link? Again, AWOL. In fact there is only one small paragraph buried 2/3rds of the way down the page about cash donations...and it just tells you to visit the FreeBSD Foundation page. Even worse, it doesn't link you to the Foundation's Donation page...it links you to the home page where you again, need to dig down and find the real donations page.

    Stick the PayPal Donate box (found here) on the top of the main FreeBSD.org page and I guarantee they'll easily quadruple their donations without doing anything else whatsoever.

    I love, love, LOVE FreeBSD, but yah...they've never been particularly good at tooting their own horn. :-/

    --
    My /. uid is better then your /. uid
  13. Re:Obligatory by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Funny

    Perhaps they should ask Apple to fund them. Good luck.

    Perhaps they should ask Apple to sue them.

    It might get them some sympathy donations . . . ?

    --
    Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
  14. Misleading Story by Zamphatta · · Score: 5, Informative

    A quick Google reveals that FreeBSD's "Year-End Fundraising Campaign" was only recently announced, on December 5th. So, naturally, they won't be all that close to their goal by December 9th.

  15. Re:Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Either it is Opposite Day in whatever land you come from, or you are a total idiot who doesn't know up from down.

    The overwhelmingly obvious trend in the last 12 years has been the decline of restrictively licensed ("copyLEFT") projects in favor of genuinely free ("copyFREE") software. There's a sole noteworthy exception to this rule trend, which is the software component that produces the greatest lock-in: the Linux kernel. (I suggest you read that last linked thread in full - it has many links to details.)

    GNU (1984) and Linux (1991) arrived many years before BSD became permissively licensed (1999). During that gap, Linux attracted a lot of attention, attained technological superiority, and, by the end of the century, it was considered the obvious choice in open source UNIX. Linux managed to capitalize on the collapse of proprietary UNIX and attract a lot of corporate support. It beats the BSD's on almost every performance benchmark. Kudos to Linus T - he got there first, made a thousand good decisions, and beat us fair and square!

    But that doesn't mean Linux will remain the king of the mountain forever. Linux is being written by the very people who its license was designed to hurt! It is a loose alliance of corps mostly trying to undermine Microsoft, and this contradiction cannot last. Linus T made the right choice by not switching to the newer more-restrictive versions of GPL, which should buy it some more time. And its jack-of-all-trades approach, trying to be the ideal kernel for everything from nano to desktops to supercomputers, will catch up to it eventually.

    See, sometime in the last few years, people actually started to pay attention to licensing, as the disadvantages of GPL started to become obvious. This resulted in a shift away from copyLEFT all across the board. Many projects switched licenses (ex. Ruby) and got a new lease on life, while in many software categories new copyFREE projects started to gradually suck away GPL's market share. At the turn of the millennium there were no decent copyFREE compilers, desktop environments, or Web browsers. Today we have Clang/LLVM, E17, and Chromium (well, almost - that's why I'd rather use Opera for now). In the most competitive categories, like scripting languages and Web servers, GPL is almost entirely dead. PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, etc are gradually squeezing MySQL. The HTML5 stack's gains are the loss of GTK/Qt/wx/etc, as well as of FFMPEG. FreeBSD is just about finished scraping off the last remnants of copyLEFT, which would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago - now finally I can run a complete UNIX system without any GNU!

    This trend is going to continue - gradually, patiently, at times with a few steps back and sideways, but moving forward in aggregate nonetheless. History takes time to play out. Maybe it will be Haiku on portable devices, and/or DragonFly BSD on large servers, and/or a completely new copyFREE OS that's yet to be initiated. Maybe the copyFREE champion Google will pull something out of its sleeve. But, sooner or later, the Penguin Empire will fall!

    --libman

  16. Re:$5/$10 minimum donation?? by ArcadeNut · · Score: 2

    Every time you make a donation via credit card or PayPal the organization gets dinged with fees. Typically it's a percentage and a per transaction fee. So with such a small donation, the fees might wind up costing them too much for the size of the donation.

    --
    Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
  17. Re:Obligatory by BrokenHalo · · Score: 2

    If Ubuntu represents the future of Linux i want none of it, I'll go back to BSD.

    Who says Ubuntu is the future of Linux? It is merely one distribution among dozens. The fact that it is the most popular at the moment is neither here nor there; during the years I have been using Linux, the previous most popular distributions have been Slackware, RedHat, Debian (and possibly Mandrake). In a year's time, the crown could pass on to some other distribution I've never heard of. (For the record, my preference is now for Arch.)

    But if BSD fits your requirements, then by all means use it.

  18. Re:Obligatory by 1s44c · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The BSD community must offer more assistance. As soon as BSD gets something similar to KVM I'll switch in a second. If Ubuntu represents the future of Linux i want none of it, I'll go back to BSD.

    FreeBSD has native ZFS which is the one reason I'm using it at home. I thought FreeBSD could act as a xen dom0 but it seems You are right, it can't.

    FreeBSD is a very nice OS and much more consistent as a whole system than any Linux distribution.

  19. Re:Obligatory by 1s44c · · Score: 2, Funny

    Whether its a dead OS or not, in an attempt to make me feel better about using Mac OS X and iOS I donated :P

    isaac@xen:~$ ping -c 2 10.0.0.107
    PING 10.0.0.107 (10.0.0.107) 56(84) bytes of data.
    64 bytes from 10.0.0.107: icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.595 ms
    64 bytes from 10.0.0.107: icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.959 ms

    It's certainly not a dead OS, it's running perfectly well.

  20. Re:Obligatory by kthreadd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As soon as BSD gets something similar to KVM I'll switch in a second.

    It's already on its way. http://bhyve.org/

  21. Re: Obligatory by peppepz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It has a completely different kernel design and a vastly different userspace. If OS X counts as a measure of the relevance of BSD because it contains BSD-derived code, then even most Linux installations 'are BSD'.

  22. Re:Obligatory by Johnny+Loves+Linux · · Score: 2
    libman, I just don't see the problem with the GPL license. The BSD license permits people to take free source code and lock it way and not share back, the big example here is Apple, and Microsoft's TCP/IP stack from 90's. The way I see it, GPL is an immunization for the user community against the jerks who want to take source code and not share back their changes.

    I understand that some people don't see why it's important to immunize the community against for want of a better analogy I call antisocials. Certainly I understand why corporations like Apple and Microsoft don't want the community to be protected from people who take without giving back, but you haven't given me a good explanation yet for why you believe GPL is restrictive.

    Yes, in terms of antisocial exploitation of software I suppose you could say it's restrictive. In terms of being able to make use of the software and modify it at will, I think it's awesomely free. The issue I personally have with the BSD license is not the terms of the license, but that it makes no provision to stop exploitation by corporations like Apple and Microsoft who do not have a history of share and share alike, but instead, a history of aggressively attempting to exterminate any competition.

    Personally, I'm looking for a software license that makes the world a better place, not some Darwinian winner-exterminates-all-other-competitors where the only survivors are the companies with lots of $$$ whose priority #1 is to make more $$$ by any means necessary such as suing competitors with BS patents.

  23. Re:Obligatory by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Informative

    GNU (1984) and Linux (1991) arrived many years before BSD became permissively licensed (1999).

    The previous license, just above the paragraph in the Wikipedia link you provided, is basically the same and pre-dates 1988 - BSD was initially released in 1977. As a user of 4.3BSD (yes, I'm old) I remember that BSD was available to pretty much anyone with a few buck for a tape and postage. My university used it while I was there from 1981-87.

    The main objection to the older license was the "advertising clause" (below), which does NOT actually restrict use of the software:

    3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:
    This product includes software developed by the .

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  24. Re:Obligatory by Watts+Martin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    While I agree with the last two sentences, it's worth noting two points which undercut your first two sentences rather dramatically:

    (1) Taking BSD-licensed code and making a proprietary fork doesn't make the previous release magically go away; it makes a new fork. If I love the open source editor FooEdit and FooEdit has a vibrant community around it, then somebody else comes along and starts selling BarEdit based on their proprietary, closed source fork, I can either choose to switch to BarEdit and accept the risks, or keep using FooEdit. (And arguably that's not a binary proposition in the first place: I can switch to BarEdit and then switch back to FooEdit.) The worst case hypothetical is that somehow BarEdit's creation kills the FooEdit community, but in reality that seems very unlikely; in practice, I can't think of a single BSD-licensed project that this has happened to. Can you? Yes, it's possible that in my scenario BarEdit would get cool new features denied to FooEdit users, but if you're deliberately choosing your software based on its "openness" then you've already decided to forgo cool features that are only in proprietary software. Furthermore, you can hardly point to BarEdit and say, "those cool BarEdit-only features would be in FooEdit if only it had been under the GPL"; the more likely case is that BarEdit would simply never have existed.

    (2) While the anonymous coward who responded with "ROFL" was perhaps unduly acerbic, his point is correct: an end user who can't debug and patch code is dependent on the developers to fix bugs regardless of the license the software she's using is under. As much as people don't like to hear this around these parts, I know an awful lot of end users who look for free software because it's free as in beer.

  25. Re:Obligatory by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

    It's probably a typo. OpenBSM is the MAC framework used by FreeBSD and Darwin. Apple funded a lot of its development, but it was originally written for FreeBSD (it's now the basis for the sandboxing system on iOS and OS X).

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  26. Re:Obligatory by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

    That hasn't been true since OS X was called Rhapsody DR2. All of the userland utilities, all of the libc, and much of the kernel either come from FreeBSD or were developed in-house by Apple.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  27. Re:Obligatory by biojayc · · Score: 2

    If there are only BSD like licenses, what is the incentive of any corporation to give back? The thinking will be "look here's this awesome tool that we can take, modify and use for ourselves. Let's do that" and giving back won't even be a part of the thought. Energy behind the free version will wane and Open source will disappear. The GPL like licenses helps us know that there WILL be current open source software out there because anyone who wants to use it as a starting point has to give back.

    You could argue that some that work on BSD software DO give back, but I think the presence of the GPL has helped the culture form and I'm just not sure that without it's presence that the pattern would continue to long.

    I could be wrong, and maybe I am, but I am glad for the GPL and fear the rise of BSD. Perhaps it's best to have both and allow them to co exist, but BSD only I'm afraid will slowly lead to only proprietary software. If someone could help me see the other side, I would certainly listen.

  28. Re:Obligatory by ilguido · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, that's a link to all the open source software included in MacOSX, or are you telling me that Apple developed OpenAL, zlib and SQLite (among many others)? Not to mention that all that APSL software is GPL incompatible, DFSG incompatible and, ironically enough, BSD incompatible. Nice try though.

  29. Re:Obligatory by Hatta · · Score: 2

    Indeed. The general trend has been away from freedom. The same has occured in the free software community, as more and more development is primarily driven by for profit corporations. The move from GPL to BSD licenses is a blow for freedom, like we've seen in every other realm over the past decade.

    --
    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  30. Re:Obligatory by greg1104 · · Score: 2

    It really is impossible to legally combine GPL and original BSD licensed software. See Why is the original BSD license incompatible with the GPL?.