@Vamp898 @dtluna this is FUD spread by people who write trivial code that nobody would bother stealing.

There's an urban legend that BSD consumers take all the source code and get filthy rich and never give any changes back. But that's just a fallacy. We get code back all the time.

Because our code is not trivial. It's complicated. And we make lots of changes. And if they don't give us their changes, they have to re-base their changes on our new code. Every single release. Again and again. It's very expensive to make your developers re-do their work over and over and over again.

So instead, companies give us their changes back unless they're too trivial to matter or specific to an application that cannot be used by a broader audience.

Maybe it's unique hardware support for something nobody else would have. Maybe it's a nasty hack that breaks things for everyone else. This is what Netflix did, by the way. Their changes to the kernel to support 100gbit streaming of movies + TLS in the kernel were offered back to us.

Here's how it played out with Netflix:

1) we don't want TLS in the kernel, no thanks, go away

2) your network stack hacks are useless to 99.999% of the world and only break other things. Even if you fixed those things we still don't want it. We'd have to hide it behind a kernel module called "netflix.ko" and we don't want that in our tree. If anyone else wants this they can hire their own TCP/IP expert to make the same changes.

Note, the people involved in this scenario are... *drumroll* FreeBSD developers!

That's right, these evil companies hire us to do this work!

A M A Z I N G

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