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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Because the way the license works, lots of *BSD users, specially companies selling routers, never contribute anything back.

Also the lawsuit with AT&T did not help.

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And lots do. Top 20 sponsored contributions from 01/01/2016 up to now sorted by number of commits (not the best metric, but still)

  1031 The FreeBSD Foundation 
   888 EMC / Isilon Storage Division
   379 Microsoft OSTC
   339 Microsoft
   297 Solarflare Communications, Inc.
   277 Dell EMC Isilon
   221 DARPA, AFRL
   170 Mellanox Technologies
   144 Chelsio Communications
   128 ABT Systems Ltd
    90 Spectra Logic Corp
    88 HEIF5
    70 Cavium
    58 Smartcom - Bulgaria AD
    57 Stormshield
    48 Netflix
    45 Rubicon Communications, LLC (Netgate)
    42 Multiplay
    38 ScaleEngine Inc.
    35 Citrix Systems R&D

Still a minority compared with the GNU/Linux contributions, but nice to see some do actually care.

"The Trouble with FreeBSD" @ 43:20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib7tFvw34DM

Less companies contribute to FreeBSD because its market share is lower than the one of Linux. And I believe first part of Beno's answer is correct - it's because FreeBSD version of RedHat didn't happened at the right moment. RedHat was there when window of opportunity opened for open source OS and was able to boost linux ecosystem by paying Linux developers which led to higher adoption which led to more contributions from corporate world.

GPL does not require contributions. GPL requires access to sources. Not to changes history, only sources. Contributions happen because it's more profitable for company (in long run) to participate in community and influence development than to be a passive actor.

My point is: license has very little to do with market share in this case. It's more about being good enough and having certain amount of luck when the right moment arives.

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