Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. & Microsoft coming to

[Bill Baxter]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Jussi Jumppanen <jussij at zeusedit.com> wrote:
> Yigal Chripun Wrote:
>
>> That is why there are many successful companies that base
>> their business model on free licenses like the GPL and zero
>> companies that use the BSD.
>
> The Apple OS X is a BSD derivative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X
>
>  "Mac OS X is based upon the Mach kernel.[7] Certain parts
>  from FreeBSD's and NetBSD's implementation of Unix were
>  incorporated in Nextstep, the core of Mac OS X."

That's more an example of just usurping BSD software for your own use.
I think Yigal was talking more about companies using the BSD license
on code they themselves write in-house.  But there are various
examples of that that come to mind:

Apple's contributions to LLVM
Adobe Open Source Labs
ILM's OpenEXR image format and tools
Enthought's contributions to NumPy/SciPy

BSD-like licenses can work for companies in the case where the
software is not the company's core business (like the first three), or
where the core business is consulting services delivered on top of the
software (like Enthought).

--bb