[zasdffaa]

That's a constructive answer, so thanks, although I have to ask your view of how BSD was used by apple to build a massive fortune but without paying significantly back to the BSD community.

Overheard from an IP lawyer I stood near to once - something about f/oss software being incorporated into commercial products being a big issue (for the free stuff, not the company doing the 'stealing' of it). Your view?

[rakoo]

This is the exact reason why copyleft licenses are important: you can reuse (A)GPL content, but if you do so the result must be given back to the community. If you're not going to pay anything, at least your product benefits everyone

[zasdffaa]

The point is the licenses are irrelevant: The IP lawyer said they take quietly, they incorporate it into their products which they sell.

the licences are being ignored. It's what she said.

[rakoo]

BSD content can be taken without contributing back, it's in the license. Copyleft content cannot. That's the main difference, and even Google doesn't want to touch copyleft content with a 10-foot pole because of the fear they'd have to share their internal sauce, so I presume companies still take licenses into account.

[zasdffaa]

Stop ignoring what I said. It's not about BSD licenses it's about more restrictive ones

You:

> This is the exact reason why copyleft licenses are important: you can reuse (A)GPL content, but if you do so the result must be given back to the community

Me: the frigging licences are being ignored. Giving back to the community is not happening. Code is being stolen. Are you trying to ignore what's being said?

[shrimp_emoji]

>BSD was used by apple to build a massive fortune but without paying significantly back to the BSD community.

Welcome to free software. :)

If you had to "pay back significantly" to use it, it would not be "free software".

It's regrettable, but it's the price of freedom. Whether that's worth it is subjective. Stallman's answer to this was the GPL. (I bet Apple wouldn't've touched BSD if it was GPL'd.) Newer, hybrid license have also emerged (like the MPL) that attempt to strike a better balance between freedom and back-contributions.

[account42]

The way I see it the problem in both cases here is that the company is using stuff created by others but not giving the same freedom to users of ther derived work.

Without copyright this situation is a lot more equalized as now you can have people make modified versions of macOS and redistribute those legally - yes, not having source access makes that more difficult, but not impossible and even if you did need the source, it only has to leak once.