this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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In my opinion, I just don't understand permissive licenses. For example, with FreeBSD's license, companies can essentially "steal" the hard-earned efforts and use them to enrich themselves. For example, FreeBSD could have been a gaming OS, as the PlayStation's OS is FreeBSD. However, they didn't give anything back to the community.
Copyleft licenses, on the other hand, require companies to contribute any changes they make to the code back to the community so that it benefits the community as a whole. In this case, there's no "stealing", companies need to respect the community's efforts by giving back.
That's my two cents anyway.
To play devil's advocate for a second - no-one is stealing anything, the code is still right where it was. If I willingly give someone a sandwich, did they steal it? Of course not.
There was a reason that PS chose FreeBSD, and it was because of the licence. If FreeBSD used the GPL then PS wouldn't have used it, hence there never would have been a FreeBSD gaming OS either way.
There basically isn't FreeBSD do for gaming as their work is locked away and not shared. If there was no BSD, Sony would have been forced to use a copyleft OS, or make their own. There was a time, a long time ago, where NetBSD was used in routers, etc. But Linux hardware support got to be so much better than NetBSDs, it got to hard to not use it. The more who used, and where forced to open their work, the better Linux got. Today it's all Linux.
Worth pointing out Oracle/Sun and IBM and OpenOffice. Before the buyout, Sun were changing the OpenOffice license to permissive in a version they would sell to IBM who used the code for their closed Lotus Office. This could be done as OpenOffice had a contributor lience agreement where copyright was handed over. So Sun had all the copyright, so could relience at will. When Oracle bought Sun, it was the final straw. So LibreOffice was born from the copyleft version, without copyright ownership, so locked open. All the development moved there. Oracle relicensed OpenOffice to permissive, and tried donating the project to Apache, but no one cared. It's been a husk for well over a decade now. And thing good can be copied straight into LibreOffice, but not the other way round. The free money for OpenOffice is over for Oracle, as is the cheap code for IBM. LibreOffice healthier than OpenOffice ever was.
Exactly, it's a defining feature of the project. They don't care how you use the code as long as you use it. It's just a different philosophy.
BSDs are just doing their own thing and whether they benefit or not from others using their work is not really a concern.
Take OpenSSH, it's used by virtually every operating system and just exists to be used. It's a great contribution to software even if OpenBSD is a tiny marginal thing used by only those that need it. They are cool with that.
If freebsd was copyleft PlayStation would've never used it in the first place. Same as the BSD TCP/IP stack with windows.
The TCP/IP stack is a good example where permissive is helpful. Getting a protocol stack adopted. In a world of a mix of open and closed, permissive can paper over cracks.
Both licenses were made before late stage capitalism started in earnest, and when the Net was young, so there's the matter of perspective.
Imho the GPL was born out of ideology, whereas the BSD was out of a murican university environment (i.e. preparing proto-capitalists to enter the market).
The debate is endless.
It's not stealing when you willingly allow someone to use it however they want. OpenBSD writes: "We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to." If your goal is to polish something like OpenSSH until it's as good as it can be, the world is better off when robust and secure software spread, also into proprietary systems. When companies use OpenSSH, it does not take away anything from OpenBSD, they are not competitors.
i believe it has the advantage of corporate interests not affecting the projects direction. i think linux is doing ok now (other than way too much redhat stuff) but i'm not sure if this is gonna continue after linus is gone.