Licensing rant / debate thread

[astyle]

I'm not talking about GPL violations because I consider those like thefts. I'm more curious about BSD licensed software and tools, for which companies have no obligations at all and thus all they give back is only due to their willingness to do it (regardless of their motivations).

Try reading the "Donor List" that the FreeBSD foundation publishes.

Ok, this isn't going the way I thought it would. Too political for my taste, sorry to have bothered you.

Well, if you dig deep enough into how licenses even work, and the reasoning for different licensing terms to exist, you do eventually get to politics and opinion camps. The point of my thread was really to talk about why software licensing even matters. Reason being - Yeah, there's this whole unpleasant, political morass of rules and limitations on what people can and cannot do with their own devices that run software. Yeah, it's kind of important to know how things work so that you avoid stepping on other people's toes.

But - there does seem to be a lack of understanding when software licensing matters, and when it really doesn't, and to what extent. This thread is kind of an attempt to crystallize the distinction between such situations.

 

[Cath O'Deray]

… the usual names are Netflix, NetApp, Juniper, Sony, Apple at one time and so on. …

When I counted things for another organisation in April:

"two thousand, four hundred and eighty-six sponsored commits".

More broadly (two sponsors, three trees):

git -C /usr/doc log --oneline --no-expand-tabs --extended-regexp --grep='Sponsored by:[[:cntrl:] ]{1,}Netgate|Rubicon'

git -C /usr/ports log --oneline --no-expand-tabs --extended-regexp --grep='Sponsored by:[[:cntrl:] ]{1,}Netgate|Rubicon'

git -C /usr/src log --oneline --no-expand-tabs --extended-regexp --grep='Sponsored by:[[:cntrl:] ]{1,}Netgate|Rubicon'

src tree, Klara or Netflix:

git -C /usr/src log --oneline --no-expand-tabs --extended-regexp --grep='Sponsored by:[[:cntrl:] ]{1,}Klara|Netflix'

And so on.