https://www.freebsdnews.com/2017/03/...collaboration/

> cool :

Great

----------------------
Steve Stites

oh yeah !

Unlike Linux, BSD can be freely used in a commercial product.

My guess is that they will try to influence FreeBSD developement, like RedHat has with pulse audio & systemd on Linux.

(They have made 'donations' to BSD before, & if I remember right, all their own (computer servers) run BSD.)

FreeBSD Foundation's board of directors is mostly academics and UNIX veterans, not a collection of corporate reps. Donating to the foundation does not mean a green light to shoehorning whatever you like into FreeBSD - but it does help to fund projects which might be focused on specific things such as improving support for certain hardware.

MS, facebook, google, et al have all donated large sums in the past.

The Linux Foundation situation is completely different, it's mainly HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, MS, NEC, Qualcomm/Atheros, Fujitsu, Samsung, Hitachi, etc who bankroll the project and have their reps on the board of directors. The foundation in turn has people like Torvalds and Kroah-Hartman on the payroll.

1 members found this post helpful.

Great news!

Then, what will last from the last stand Unix system (BSD)?

It's all speculation. But if you look at just the known facts (most of which are available at the foundation website), there is not really too much incentive for big corporations to get directly involved in FreeBSD and turn it into a frankensystem, as has happened elsewhere...

1) There is already Linux and Linux based systems, which work well enough and are already heavily corporate controlled, influenced or owned.

2) Proprietary vendors can simply take much of FreeBSD (or NetBSD and OpenBSD) and simply use the code according to the licence and close it off, use it and sell it as a proprietary product (e.g. Junos, macOS, various commercial firewalls, Playstation 4 OS, Nintendo Switch OS, etc).

3) Much of what many think of as "Linux" is the Linux kernel and GNU "userland". The rest is what we would refer to as "ports", software which can be built for any platform (such as X.org server for example). The software which is arguably the "bad" software has already become "Linux proprietary" and won't compile and run on other *nix without considerable time and effort. This is also what corporations have become heavily invested in and are funding by way of donations or by employing the developers.

4) It's actually the nature of Stallman's GPL which causes corporations to become directly involved. Where code simply cannot be taken and just used, whole projects and people have to be bought off/infiltrated with corporate reps instead. That's what happened to Linux. It wouldn't be worthwhile, nor cost effective, to do this to FreeBSD.

5) The corporations backing Linux, systemd, gnome, etc get the best of both worlds. They get usable software from a mainly volunteer workforce... a handful of lead developers are on the payroll and they throw what really amounts to peanuts in donations (and get some good publicity), but that's about it. Compare this to the astronomical running costs of a "closed shop" like Microsoft.

3 members found this post helpful.

This is amazing.
I don't think that it is very fair for developers, which do not take benefits from it for their time, time consuming, efforts,....

You're exactly right. It's called "capitalism".

This has been going on for decades and yes it's similar with *BSD as well, except the corporate suits are mostly not sitting on the board, supporting their employers' interests.

If you look at how Linux evolved, it started as a "lego bricks" system where all the pieces come from different sources. The end user, built those components from source and as a result got a free operating system - free in every sense of the word. This complex, "fragmented" eco system could never be tied down, centralised or steered and back then few were interested in doing so. That was what was good about it. Times have changed.

Distributions followed and in the early days of Slackware, Debian and the various other short lived ancestors such as SLS and Yggdrasil, it was very much a one man band thing or a small group just putting together their own spin, burning some discs and selling it on.

From early 00's to the present, distributions lost their way and entered a kind of "race to the desktop" to automate and do as much as possible for the end user, but to what end? I'd say that only Slackware Linux has stuck to it's roots and shunned the "automagic" route and stuck to it's original business model. Many have gone down the excessively corporate route, hiding the fact that they're Linux and deliberately targeting the clueless as a drop in replacement for MS Windows.

Now the situation is that there are a handful of major distributions, which are of corporate interest and thousands of minor distributions or derivatives which are not. If you make a big change in one of these "trunk" distributions, the others will eventually follow suit (sometimes after years of kicking and screaming). When Debian adopted systemd, Canonical Ltd sacked it's upstart developers and followed suit - it's "just business". The big distributions have influence and can steer things, especially Red Hat, the others pretty much cannot. They take what comes from upstream, work with it, or not. When the software they rely on ceases development, they either pick up development themselves, or slide into the rut and switch to the "new implementation". The corporate world know that completely "free" development lacks, time resources and money - and this is something they can use to their advantage.

This is where BSD derived operating systems differ. The core operating systems themselves strive to be as independent as possible. The ports tree is 3rd party software and the development model is focused on improving the core, in line with the project goals. Apart from some of the desktop oriented FreeBSD spins, none of the projects are invested in "marketing" a windows replacement or denying the roots of the core technologies. OpenBSD for example is developed by the developers, for the developers, not for "appealing" to "mass consumer" style users which Linux distributions seek to attract.

1 members found this post helpful.