While BSD did get some help from the corps basing off it, ultimately it is a roll of the dice if they decide to contribute back, where as with GPL, it is enforced at a license level, and the newer AGPL license helps avoid the issue you describe with Netflix not being legally obligated to contribute back code that’s distributed under the normal GPL.

I personally think GPL/AGPL provides a better outcome for regular users, and empowers them to not be beholden to closed gardens and proprietary software, where as the BSD enables corporations to enshittify forks by legally allowing them to become closed and proprietary.

Also @Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip

Thanks for the info, I was going off stuff I’d read years ago, but I should’ve done more research to verify.

Looks like Mac OS is indeed still mostly a continuation of NextStep, though the original NextStep itself seems to have incorporated a decent amount from BSD. I was misinformed about the Switch, it looks like there was a fair amount of threads from a decade ago perpetuating that it ran on a BSD of some sort, and never came across the corrections. I edited my post to reflect that new info.

It’s an open source license that lets anyone take the code and relicense it under a proprietary license. That enables corporations to take the code, make it closed source, and profit from it without legally having to give anything back to the project that made the code in the first place (as an example, the PS3, PS4 and PS5 are all forks of BSD. And some parts of Mac OS and the Nintendo Switches take some parts from BSD. All of them were able to close source the code, making them proprietary).

Since they don’t have to contribute back to the original project, BSD itself didn’t benefit as much from all those corporations using it, despite the billions they made doing so, and all the users of those products were stuck with a closed source OS they couldn’t modify.

In comparison, Linux projects generally use the GPL license, which doesn’t allow anyone who forks the code to change the license to something other than GPL. That means if they distribute their forked version publicly, they are legally obligated to provide access to the source code to whomever requests it. So any beneficial changes they made can make it back upstream to the original project, as well as ensuring the end-users are never trapped in a closed ecosystem, since they can always fork it if a corporation goes rogue and enshittifies.

A phone repair shop could pop in a new battery. It wouldn’t be secure to use on the internet, but it’d be a good mp3 player :)

+1 to banning AI projects.

For those who have the means, please consider donating to PostmarketOS, which has been slowly but surely pushing forward pure linux support for phones, and is the best longterm solution we have to completely circumvent Google and reclaim our hardware permenantly.