The future of NetBSD

[John Baldwin]

On Thursday 31 August 2006 14:47, Jeff Rollin wrote:
> 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).

That's not true.  If Google makes an enhancement to Linux that they only
distribute internally, they are only required to make the source code
available internally.  You only have to give your patches to the folks
you distribute the resulting binaries to.  Thus, if you merely make appliances 
that manage/produce content and sell the content but not the appliances, you 
can mix propietary code with the GPL to your heart's content.  But really, 
the economics of open source is actually more complicated than the GPL folks 
understand.

-- 
John Baldwin