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Comment by lcampbell | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, Netflix and Facebook each donated gold-tier (25-50k USD) this year[1]. I would be very surprised if none of those companies employ engineers submitting patches upstream -- obviously for some things it doesn't make sense (proprietary drivers for PS4 hardware, etc). A cursory search turned up this[2], for example.

[1] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donors/

[2] https://people.freebsd.org/~rrs/asiabsd_tls_improved.pdf

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Plus, US tax law has some requirements around nonprofits and number of contributors. The single or few large donors is great, but the org needs to show wide support. So a twenty $5 donations is better than a single $100 donation.

I have no ties to the FreeBSD project or its foundation, but it seems very cheap for companies that profit billions of dollars yearly to only donate $25k to projects and foundations that support part of the software backbone of their infrastructure... Regardless of regulatory barriers, if this got a bit more exposure it could actually be a PR liability, IMO...

>but it seems very cheap for companies that profit billions of dollars yearly to only donate $25k to projects and foundations that support part of the software backbone of their infrastructure..

That's the free rider problem, one that the GPL (and the AGPL) was designed to avoid.

It's true that many of those companies which use FreeBSD wouldn't touch a GPL codebase (and all the more so an AGPL codebase), but that't the point - while some chose FreeBSD because it's fast/stable (NF and WhatsApp), others chose it because they don't have to contribute back.

At some point we have to acknowledge that our modern technological society relies on having a common, free foundation of tools available to everyone. Sometimes really big companies will get more value out than they put in, but so does everyone else and that's kind of the point of a foundational tool.

All of this free, open, etc. software works in part because of a "pay it forward" approach to the community. If people shame big users for not "paying back" enough, rather than finding more productive means of encouragement, the whole system of free tools becomes less tenable because future users will pick other tools that don't have PR risk attached.

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