Ports are developed by corporations. Corporations will not spend time and money supporting multiple things, they can barely deal with one. And realistically, if you have only one to pick, your pick is going to be Linux.
I remember at one point FreeBSD was said to have an even better networking stack than Linux. Is that still true? I think there has to be a reason most ARM based routers run Linux rather than BSD.
I remember at one point FreeBSD was said to have an even better networking stack than Linux. Is that still true? I think there has to be a reason most ARM based routers run Linux rather than BSD.
I remember at one point FreeBSD was said to have an even better networking stack than Linux. Is that still true? I think there has to be a reason most ARM based routers run Linux rather than BSD.
Apple products (OS X, iOS) are based on BSD. So, it is very popular, just not in the way you want.
..., because the license of Linux is quite restrictive ...
It's not. What you probably mean is that companies can not "take and don't give back".
It's not. What you probably mean is that companies can not "take and don't give back".For us (defense) it is.
Restrictive GPL license -> can't use it -> no opportunity to improve it -> no give back.
Nice BSD (or similar) license -> can use it -> will improve it -> will give back.
Wrong, you can use GPL'ed software as long as you give back. "Qui pro quo":
Wrong, you can use GPL'ed software as long as you give back. "Qui pro quo":
There even isn't any absolute "must give back" clause in GPL - this is a common misconception. Internally to the company, nothing prevents you from modifying GPL licensed software for any purpose.
Some remarks:
You can modify and use GPL'ed software without giving back as long as you don't distribute it e.g. as long
as you keep it internal in your organization.
Second, if you do modify GPL'ed software, you only need to give back to the person or organization you distributed to.
You get to use GPL'ed software on the condition that the community get your modifications and/or
the software that links to it. Sounds fair to me.
You get to use GPL'ed software on the condition that the community get your modifications and/or
the software that links to it. Sounds fair to me.
I think I get the point of open source software, which has a lot of great aspects, but I'm not sure about fairness.
One of the issues I see with it is that there is no concept (that I know of, but I'm certainly no specialist of GPL) of proportion, which I personally think can't be separated from the concept of fairness.
One example (very frequent in private companies) is the following: let's assume you just want to use one GPL library in your product, mainly because it's robust, proved and reasonably supports some standards. The fact that you would have to give away your whole software source code, which is probably a lot more than just a library, is often not fair. It's not in proportion of what you took. There may be some tricks to circumvent that (such as isolating your software in pieces and make sure there is only one small module that uses the GPL library), but I don't know if it's a valid approach according to GPL at all.
And what about the private companies that use Linux and or Libreoffice and lots of other software for free without giving back anything?
For every example you give, I can give you another example that shows unfairness from the opposite site.
If you believe it's not in proportion, then don't use GPL'ed software, nobody forces you to use it.
I just don't understand people who want to write software for free under a BSD style license without getting any payment and let other companies
make money with it and without the obligation to give modifications back...
The vast majority of people writing open-source software don't get any payment in return. Only a small fraction of them get retributed, directly or indirectly.
There are other incentives for doing this, such as willing to share your work and knowing other people will use it. It can be very rewarding. Also, some people will do it to get some credit, get known and in the end have more job opportunities.
Forcing people to share (with a restrictive license) is not necessarily the best way of encouraging sharing.
You get to use GPL'ed software on the condition that the community get your modifications and/or
the software that links to it. Sounds fair to me.