The future of NetBSD

[Jeff Rollin]

On 31/08/06, Paul Saab <ps at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> Jeff Rollin (jeff.rollin at gmail.com) wrote:
> > If Yahoo (to pick the one big vendor I remember making a big thing of
> using
> > a BSD) don't reincorporate their changes, perhaps that's because the
> license
> > allows them not to?
>
> If you think that Yahoo! has not given back to the FreeBSD project,
> then you are sorely mistaken.  Let me count the ways that Yahoo!
> has given back.


As I said, Yahoo are the one big company I remember being cited as using a
BSD. My point was not that "Yahoo does not give back to the FreeBSD
project," but that the BSD licence *allows* them not to give back in a way
that the GPL does not allow (say) Google not to give back to the Linux
project(s).

1. Most of the freebsd cluster resides in a Yahoo! datacenter
> 2. Up until I left at the end of June, Yahoo had a team of 5 people
>    working on FreeBSD and we gave back just about everything we were
>    working on to the project.  Now there are 4, but they are doing
>    incredible work for FreeBSD.
> 3. NFS locking came from Yahoo!
> 4. SACK came from Yahoo!
> 5. Accept filters came from Yahoo!
> 6. AMD64 port came from Yahoo!
> 7. IA64 hardware and support came from Yahoo! pushing Intel
> 8. bce came from Yahoo/Iron port pushing on Broadcom to produce a driver
> 9. ciss came from Yahoo!
> 10. bge improvements and fixes came from Yahoo!
> 11. accept filters came from Yahoo!
> 12. Numerous private contracts to improve various drivers were funded by
>     Yahoo!
> 13. A ton of ATA hardware was sent to sos to make sure drivers were
> supported
>     and yahoo didn't even use most of those controllers.
> 14. Many other developers got hardware directly from Yahoo!
> 15. Intel supporting em on FreeBSD came from Yahoo! pressuring Intel
> 16. minidumps
> 17. twe/twa support came from Yahoo! pressuring 3ware
>
> I can go on, but my memory gets hazy after 6.5 years of working on
> FreeBSD for Yahoo, so before you go bashing Yahoo!, just know that
> there are plenty of people doing nothing but FreeBSD work at Yahoo!
> We never felt it necessary to actually note that code came from
> Yahoo! since most committers know that the code came from Yahoo!
>

If I were going to bash Yahoo!, I would probably pick some other aspect to
moan about. Like! Those! El Reg! Yahoo! related! Headlines! That! Were!
Funny! At First! But Got! Predictable! After a while!

Jeff.