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Crowding out OpenBSD

Posted Dec 5, 2012 10:44 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848)
In reply to: Crowding out OpenBSD by man_ls
Parent article: Crowding out OpenBSD

> commercial vendors using GPL always give something back

Yes, but what they give is very frequently not useful. I'd argue that a culture of contribution to a common core is much more important than the legal requirement, overall. Also GPL is often sidestepped so that the actual useful stuff isn't shared anyway, even when it probably should be (c.f. kernel modules).

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Posted Dec 5, 2012 10:54 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

History says otherwise. A few notable examples:

Apple has a long culture of non-contribution (they created their own C compiler to avoid GCC's license), but still they adopted KTHML as WebKit and have been improving it all along, even when their mortal enemy Google adopted it too.
Many companies that were previously averse to GPL code (and Free software in general) are now contributing actively to the Linux kernel. Just in the 3.7 kernel we find Oracle, AMD (previously ATI), Marvell or Cisco.

For every Nvidia there are many Apples.

Crowding out OpenBSD

Posted Dec 5, 2012 12:38 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]

True, the kernel is a pretty strong counterexample. And the requirement to contribute back probably can be a good way of getting good cultures set up, telling a manager "we have to make the code available anyway, we may as well work upstream" is probably helpful.