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by rbanffy 5829 days ago
> No one can tell what would of happened if this was the case

You can look at the market and see if you could form a Red Hat around BSD. Call me back when you get funded.

> Developers know what they're getting into

And that's precisely why stuff like BtrFS is not BSD-licensed. Because the following week, Microsoft would launch their new and improved next-generation NTFS. There may be no successful BSD-branded ("ClosedBSD"? "ArrestedBSD"?) fork (BTW, is JUNOS open? I couldn't download the source) but certainly many pieces of BSD software end up inside proprietary software, and nobody knows exactly how those wheels were modified.

1 comments

>You can look at the market and see if you could form a Red Hat around BSD.

I don't really see how monetizing from BSD/MIT source code would be different than monetizing from GPL code.

>Call me back when you get funded.

I am sure Apple, Microsoft and Adobe make more money than Red Hat . So again what is your point? Not everything in this life is about money.

>And that's precisely why stuff like BtrFS is not BSD-licensed.

And that's precisely why FreeBSD folk have ZFS and Linux folk don't.

>Because the following week, Microsoft would launch their new and improved next-generation NTFS.

ZFS porting from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD hasn't been easy. What makes you think that porting another modern and complex file system from Linux to Windows would be easy for Microsoft? And anyways it would be awesome that we could get native read/write on Windows partitions from Linux.

>many pieces of BSD software end up inside proprietary software, and nobody knows exactly how those wheels were modified.

>>Developers know what they're getting into

Good, how much have Apple contributed back to FreeBSD? Apple also forked the LGPL licensed KHTML to form WebKit.

Does Apple have a real model that benefits open source/free software compared to the much smaller Red Hat? The only companies that I knew that contributed the same amount to open source/free software as Red Hat were Sun and Google.

But I must be just, Apple has released some open source code (GCD comes to mind) and as far as I'm informed funded some open source software (LLVM for example).