[yukIttEft]

Big tech wouldn't exist without Linux. Why aren't they forced to contribute?

[kryptiskt]

I don't believe this is a money issue, almost all maintainers and big kernel contributors already work for big tech. Thing is, you can't just simply hire more maintainers as there are only so many senior kernel contributors around and most of those that aren't already maintainers probably don't want the role as it is now.

[potatopatch]

Sounds like a money thing. Being a kernel engineer is being handcuffed to one or a small number of companies and a particular community. Meanwhile going up the stack is easy, will pay the same or offer higher risk/reward financial choices and let's you work anywhere.

[pjmlp]

Big tech would be using BSD instead if the lawsuit had been clarified before GNU/Linux took off.

How much did UNIX vendors, Apple, Sony and co have contributed to BSDs?

[yukIttEft]

But now that they are heavily invested in Linux, it would be a good time to make them contribute.

I mean isn't this the exact same tactic they use with their as-a-service offerings all the time?

[pjmlp]

The preference for non-copyleft licenses and SaaS kind of makes their point.

It is no surprise that none of new FOSS OSes for IoT use the GPL, including Zephyr, ironically hosted by the Linux Foundation.