Right, just like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Sony, Netflix, Juniper and everyone else who uses BSD software never, ever gives their additions back.
Oh wait... they do!
Oh wait... they do!
- async sendfile
- rewrite of the pbuf system
- unmapped mbufs
- kernel TLS
- RACK TCP
- BBR TCP
- TCP high precision timer system (TCP pacer)
- various NUMA improvements, which allow us to stream in excess of 200Gb/s of TLS encrypted video traffic from a single server
- Metric tons of fixes
Contributing stuff back makes it easier to work with other folks, and makes our jobs easier. We merge from upstream FreeBSD-current every few weeks. The smaller the diff we carry forward, the easier our jobs are.
It would be nice in this kind of threads if both sides were just honest in presenting how things work. Companies will decide on contributing back BSD code based on competitive advantages of doing so. It is a business decision. They can reducing costs by having the code maintained by upstream and reduce integration costs, or they can get advantage over their competitors by keeping the code proprietary.
I see similar discussing when companies talk about paying taxes. The press releases will talk about contributing back to society and being responsible citizen, while at the same time employing lawyers who do "tax management" in order to pay as little tax as possible. It is true that they do contribute back with numbers that looks impressive, and paying some taxes is easier than paying no taxes, but a honest description would call it a calculated business decision that balance benefits and drawbacks between compliance and tax avoidance.
i’m not sure that’s exactly true is it? [0] or at least it seems quite murky (case-by-case, state-by-state) [1]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
[1] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5dc3f206-0fcc...
The difference here is Netflix can choose which part to contribute back. In most cases the CDN work is not their core competitive advantage, their Quality Content are. Which means Netflix can contribute back everything they have done.
I'm still bitter at how they murdered KHTML.
(Before someone comments "But KHTML is LGPL!": I know. That's the point. The GPL doesn't have these problems. The LGPL is too weak to be meaningful.)
Murdered? Thanks in large part to the work Apple did to transform KHTML into WebKit, WebKit and its derivatives (like Blink) have utterly dominated the browser marketplace. I have a hard time reconciling your characterization of Apple's action with the facts.
Yes, we know that a certain subset of Free Software zealots prefer preventing non-Free software to promoting Free software.
> What happened wasn't, though.
Why exactly is the creation of a set of F/OSS browser engine cores which have essentially completely extinguished the proprietary cores to dominate the space not “fine”?
Apple forked one in a hostile fashion, and later used it to release proprietary software.
A substantial volume of web browsers, including the largest two (Chrome, Safari), are proprietary software, directly because of this.
It made the WWW less free, and hurt users.
I guess you are the 0.0001% of the internet who consider Chrome and Safari to be proprietary software, when it has an Open Source version freely available.