
Netflix Is an Example of a Great Open-Source Corporate Patron to FreeBSD - rbanffy
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Netflix-FreeBSD-Contributions
======
mikece
Netflix isn't the only one contributing back to Netflix. In his interview with
Bryan Lunduke, George Neville-Neil[1] explained why it's very much in the
interest of companies like Netflix, Juniper, and others who base their systems
on FreeBSD to contribute back all "infrastructure-level" changes they make: it
helps the FreeBSD community and also reduces the amount of sysadmin overhead
when it comes to upgrading to newer versions of FreeBSD. Only those things
which are unique differentiators for their business are withheld and kept
proprietary. For Juniper that's going to be a lot more than Netflix but it
still disproves the GPL puritans who rip on BSD/MIT/Apache2 licensed software
as being black holes from which companies won't contribute back to the
community.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cofKxtIO3Is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cofKxtIO3Is)

~~~
rbanffy
> disproves the GPL puritans who rip on BSD/MIT/Apache2 licensed software as
> being black holes from which companies won't contribute back

It's still much rarer for companies to contribute back to *BSD. The risk of
your competitor taking what you did and making it better and not sharing back
their own secret sauce is still there.

