[na85]

And thus the failure of BSD-style licensing is thrown into sharp relief:

Why are these projects that are used by many large and extraordinarily profitable tech enterprises dependent on community donations?

I recommend not donating, because to do so directly supports corporate parasitism.

[iE4mHBzmoYezwbx]

Really? Their biggest donors are large and extraordinarily profitable tech enterprises. (Like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook)

And thus the success of BSD-style licensing is thrown into sharp relief. (Also the fact that you or I can go use it as much as we want for free and do whatever we want to it.)

[Sunspark]

The flip side of course is that improvements also come at the pace of volunteerism, and there are no boardroom meetings where a manager tells the BSD developers that they didn't type enough lines of code that week.

If a corp wants a feature improved or implemented if it doesn't exist, they will have to pay someone and then they have to decide whether they will contribute it. If they do not, then they have to maintain a fork themselves which requires ongoing resources.

At the end of the day, I don't think it really matters that much. The corps are providing a service not a software application. If they weren't using BSD, they'd be using something else.

[chasil]

There used to be complaint from OpenBSD that large corporate users of OpenSSH weren't donating anything, so I sent them $100.

Those days appear to be over.

https://www.theregister.com/2015/07/08/microsoft_donates_to_...

[mekster]

Better than nothing but it's far from what the title describes as "rains cash".

MS : $25k - $50k

Google , FB : $10k - $25k

For them, that's like saying "Hi". For the financial value the OpenBSD foundation is creating, that's a miniscule return.

[chasil]

It is a bit anemic, upon reflection.

Still, I haven't heard any recent complaint on fundraising goals.