It's not about the license [LWN.net]

It's not about the license

Posted Sep 8, 2006 4:36 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: It's not about the license by mheily
Parent article: The future of NetBSD

Current growth and commercial support.

Both the BSD's and Linux has very strong commercial usage. With BSD systems your not going to see the code returned back to you it ends up in propriatory products like OS X.

With Linux and the GPL you get the code back and it goes on to improve the base product.

This is a big reason why even though FreeBSD and friends were technically superior to Linux systems for a long time, they aren't anymore. Linux has had a strong technological return from investments from people like IBM, SGI, HP, and other commercial stuff. The BSD's get some stuff back from people like Apple, but nothing that is realy important.

BSD code, because of it's license probably has wider usage then GPL'd code.. but it's not going to have much of a impact on people actually using straight BSD-based systems because they wont' ever see 90% of improvements done on it.

This probably doesn't have much to do with NetBSD's current orginizational woes, but it has a impact on the BSD distros as a whole when you compare BSD systems vs other systems. That's not to say that BSD systems taken by themselves aren't nice, so don't get me wrong here.

(Log in to post comments)