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Comment by tachion | Hacker News Reader

While you're here, have you donated[0][1] yet? :) You may or may not be aware, but FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your games on PlayStation and Nitendo Switch, your files on FreeNAS and ZFS, your friends on WhatsApp and OpenBSD runs everything else on OpenSSH. ;)

So, you may or may not know that, but you need FreeBSD and OpenBSD and they also need you! Every cent counts and so does every contributor, that helps the foundations keep their non-profit status. Also, you CAN be the change, if you specify what you'd like your donation to be used for (like more secure defaults for the OS).

[0] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

[1] https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html

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Seems to me that Netflix, Sony, et al should be paying FreeBSD, not the users. Why would I subsidize FreeBSD so that mega corps can leech off the hard work of volunteers, and by extension leech off my donation?

They do pay, both in code and donations.

Obviously these hugely profitable companies don't pay enough. Otherwise I should not need to donate.

Obviously Windows should be free, with all the huge companies that use that. The logic makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense if you don't personally own or use Windows. I don't pay Microsoft again to play TitanFall just because their servers are hosted on Azure.

I understand we all probably use tools everyday that can be attributed to these projects and I don't mean to imply that you shouldn't give them money. Just that the Netflix/WhatsApp comments seem a little disingenuous. That shouldn't be in the "reasons you need BSD", those are just reasons Neflix and WhatsApp need BSD.

You might one day want to run a startup or a project and then you could just do it on FreeBSD in any way you like, given the permissive license and this is exactly the reason why you need BSD, not only because Netflix or WhatsApp uses them to serve you the service.

I should donate to every project on github in case I need to use one somewhere in the future!

I can guarantee you'll need to use an operating system, they're rather essential. Ensuring the basic building blocks are available for future use is beneficial, and showing what has previously been built with them shows why.

No need to be smug, FreeBSD is hardly the only operating system available to us.

I'm not saying that it is, just that you can't compare it to "every project on github."

I'll try to explain my reasoning, then.

If Netflix and other very profitable companies are, as I'm told, contributing in both code and money to FreeBSD, and if I'm also being asked to donate, then the contributions from said corporations are obviously not enough to cover the costs of FreeBSD development.

Since I pay for Netflix, why should I double-pay by donating to FreeBSD? Seems to me that Netflix should be digging a little deeper into their pockets.

I don't understand your point re: Windows. If companies are paying for Windows, then Microsoft is receiving a payment which they have presumably set at a level they deem sufficient to support continuing development of Windows and other projects. I see no parallel to my point about FreeBSD other than the fact that both are operating systems.

You don't pay Netflix to use FreeBSD, you pay them for a streaming video service that would be indistinguishable to you if they used Linux.

I'd expect Netflix to pay enough for FreeBSD to fund things they're interested in for running their own infrastructure. This is how free software development works, if you have an itch you either scratch it yourself or pay someone to scratch it.

You wouldn't want a FreeBSD that would be entirely funded by Netflix either, because nobody would be working on anything Netflix itself didn't need, such a system would quickly end up being useless to you.

You're not supposed to do that so that the mega corps could do that. You're supposed to do that so that _anyone_ could do that and benefit from the open source code that's best suited for running a business, even if your idea of running a business and using open source is to not share anything back.

Any citations about Switch using FreeBSD by chance?

http://www.osnews.com/story/29698/Nintendo_Switch_runs_FreeB...

That line of citations just ends in a tweet quoting a copyright notice from the FreeBSD kernel.

That doesn't mean the Switch runs FreeBSD, just that Nintendo used some code from the kernel, which could be as small as adapting a single driver to their in-house OS.

It's not FreeBSD[1]. This is doubled up by the fact that the networking system module is called "bsd"[2].

[1] https://reswitched.tech/software/oss

[2] http://switchbrew.org/index.php?title=Sockets_services

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