FreeBSD

[Alejandro Imass]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 1:22 PM ezekiel motta <ezekielmotta017 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Precisely. Apple is parasitical, but so is everyone else. Google's use of
> Linux, Torvald's use of Unix, Ubuntu's use of Debian, PopOS use of Ubuntu,
> Manjaro's use of Arch, ad infinitum.
> There is nothing morally repugnant about it, just as there is nothing
> repugnant about the remora's behaviour vis a vis the shark.
> I did not mean it as a moralistic comment.
>
>
Parasitical usually means all take and no give back which IMHO is very well
represented by Oracle and their CEO actually saying it out aloud: "Larry
Ellison: “If an Open Source Product Gets Good Enough, We’ll Simply Take
It.” Most everyone else you mentioned above has given a lot of value to
their original projects. For example, Ubuntu has probably given more to
Debian than people might realize. E.g. If you have a hardware issue in
Debian, you will probably find the answer in an Ubuntu forum or mailing
list, and most of the time, these patches make their way back to Debian
and/or the Linux kernel.

I think derived works and/or forks are more of an ecosystem model than
parasitical. There are some notable exceptions, but in general I think that
most who fork, will happily give back to their upstream.

Back to FreeBSD, IMO the Desktop is definitively not the focus, although
there are many hard-core FBSD users who use it as a workstation.

The opportunity is there, especially with FBSD's licencing, but I think it
requires some financial benefit to make it worthwhile to invest in the
arduous process of maintaining workstation type software, and convincing
partners to join your cause, for example basic stuff like Skype or Zoom.

IIRC iXsystems tried this with TrueOS, I am guessing inspired by their
success with FreeNAS, but eventually killed the project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueOS

IMO (and this is not criticism) the core FreeBSD is not really interested
in the applications of FreeBSD as such but more to maintain the original
and purest possible form of Unix remaining on the planet. That is why I
don't see *BSD projects as parasitical at all, but rather focused
implementations / applications of FreeBSD.

Best,

-- 
Alejandro Imass