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Comment by xorblurb | Hacker News Reader

It would be unwelcome for BSD projects to complain about freeloaders given "freeloading" is explicitly authorized.

You can take a quick look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free... for a non exhaustive list of products based on FreeBSD. Some of them are doing some contributions, maybe some of them are 100% open source (I don't know), but clearly some are not open sourcing their most added value stuff, even when it is a clear derivative of BSD code.

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BSD projects sometimes do complain about their code getting put into GPLed code (usually Linux).

It's bizarre. They'd rather have their code locked up into someone else's codebase than having it always free in someone else's codebase.

Proprietary codebase does not deprive original project from potential contributors. Gpl'd fork might

Heaven forbid that developers have a choice in what they contribute to!

On the contrary, closed products very often compete against open ones.

Potential contributors often never hear about the Open Source projects used behind their television, phone, routers, editors, games...

When it is in a proprietary codebase it can potentially be contributed back. Once it is in GPL it is tainted and while similarly to a corporate codebase the original contributer could give a BSD licenced patch back to the BSD project, it diverts other open source contributors away from the original project.

Look at OpenOffice compared to LibreOffice, for an example of this. If there wasn't a GPL version the community would have rallied around the Apache version.

> Look at OpenOffice compared to LibreOffice, for an example of this. If there wasn't a GPL version the community would have rallied around the Apache version.

OpenOffice not working at all is not due to the license, at all. OpenOffice didn't work for a long time. Distributions have always added a huge patch to make it work nicely for them. There's been calls for ages to change things and not much was done with it.

Eventually they started LibreOffice and focussed on making it easy to contribute.

In above, nothing is about the license!!

Sorry if I'm wrong, but wasn't libre office partially started because OpenOffice stagnated?

The first release of Apache Open Office was 2012, almost a year after LibreOffice. Open Office itself stagnated while still dual licensed under Suns proprietary license and LGPL. I think one of the complaints was that they took too long to merge patches by contributors.

OpenOffice removed a bunch of GPLed code. As a result, it just does less than LibreOffice. Why work on a less functional codebase?

I don't know if that's the reason why it didn't pick up, but generally I think of code that goes to the Apache Foundation as going there to die. The foundation seems to receive abandoned code that nobody wants to maintain.

OpenOffice was a dying project. Sun had been fairly unresponsive to the community and unwilling to fold in community changes. When Oracle bought them it got worse still. Projects like Go-OO started up, which wasn't so much a fork as a patch-set. OpenOffice was looking sad and it looked a lot like the best known FOSS suite was doomed to splinter and die.

Then LibreOffice was started to sort this all out. A real fork, a new name, it folded in Go-OO and other community improvements and committed to proper governance, addressing technical debt etc.

A year or so later, Oracle 'gifted' the stunted and now somewhat left behind OO.o to the Apache project. A few corporates got behind it, but it had no community traction, and any small improvements that did get rolled in were very quickly adopted by LO, where flow the other way was almost non-existant.

This is not really a story of licensing as much as it is community mismanagement by Sun, and active hostility from Oracle.

Taking BSD or MIT code and making it GPL IMO is to make it less usable for no good reason.

The BSD/MIT licensed code is still available. Your statement is meaningless.

If I remember correctly, they complained when people replaced the BSD license with GPL, which was a license violation (you don't get to arbitrarily relicense the code). That seems strictly worse than the code being used following the original license terms (a copy of the license in the manual, not publishing the source).

Also, I thought that was resolved by putting the license back in the file, causing it to be licensed under the intersection of BSD and GPL.

And? If FreeBSD had a more restrictive license, the developers of those products would have simply chosen another similar project, or used proprietary software.

The OpenBSD people complain all the time with OpenSSH and the like.

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