boonhet

@boonhet@sopuli.xyz · Joined ⁨Jun⁩ ⁨2025⁩

Replying to @⁨Cocodapuf@lemmy.world⁩

It’s a mixed bag.

The major companies that use it, contribute back to it (think Netflix, Sony, Apple, etc). If they didn’t have a copyleft option, Sony and Apple would’ve built completely closed-source and wouldn’t be contributing to anything. Netflix is different in that GPL wouldn’t force them to disclose their modifications, they just preferred FreeBSD because of its networking stack, they would’ve probably just gone with Linux if FreeBSD didn’t exist.

Replying to @⁨cenzorrll@piefed.ca⁩

Of the ones listed, Apple and Sony have definitely contributed back to FreeBSD. Apple hired the lead LLVM dev and paid him to keep working on it. Sony has paid for LLVM development in particular, but also development of other parts of FreeBSD. Source on the Sony bit, which also mentions that for example Netflix is an even bigger contributor

There’s plenty of benefit in contributing back to permissive projects you use, because you have less maintenance overhead if the diff between your fork and the upstream source is smaller.

redditHow much did Sony contribute to the freebsd codebase?I wouldn't put them on par with the likes of Netflix, but Sony has definitely paid for a significant amount of code in FreeBSD. Most or all of it...

Replying to @⁨jabjoe@feddit.uk⁩

redditHow much did Sony contribute to the freebsd codebase?I wouldn't put them on par with the likes of Netflix, but Sony has definitely paid for a significant amount of code in FreeBSD. Most or all of it...

Replying to @⁨pelya@lemmy.world⁩

Well, Sony contributes, but not as much as Netflix (mostly by paying for development, especially LLVM development)

Apple hired the founder of LLVM and paid him to work on LLVM.

LLVM is pretty important to FreeBSD.

Plenty of big companies contribute to BSD financially or let their devs commit code to BSD because maintaining your own fork is tedious work and the smaller your changes from the upstream source, the easier your life.

redditHow much did Sony contribute to the freebsd codebase?I wouldn't put them on par with the likes of Netflix, but Sony has definitely paid for a significant amount of code in FreeBSD. Most or all of it...