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What sense is licensing operating system on BSD license?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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The code is still open, and the repos will still exist if a fork is created. Sony forks FreeBSD for PS6, and nothing happens to FreeBSD. It still exists, and it still works. The added bonus is not having to deal with Sony, or other people, trying to upstream stuff that doesn’t make sense outside of the PS environment and would have questionable value to others.
There are lots of ways companies get around the GPL, and most are GPL sanctioned.
Starting a company, use the GPL. Starting a project for fun, use whatever because the companies are going to steal it anyway if it’s good.
GPL doesn't force people to merge back to upstream, and BSD doesn't have any special way to stop people from trying to upstream. The only difference is that Sony's PS6 OS fork would have been open source if it were bound by the GPL, which would be an objective benefit.
Fair, the patches don’t have to be accepted. 🙂
Would it be bound by the GPL? Companies love writing shims, and the Linux kernel is pro-business. It is specifically GPLv2 to allow companies to use it in closed source applications. TiVo is the poster child for this.
Anything running in user space isn’t considered a derivative work. The kernel ABI specifically allows for this. A closed source application could run on top of the Linux kernel and not have to be released.
Applications linking to a GPL library, glibc excluded, would have to be released since that would constitute a derivative work.
I’m the PS6 scenario, we would probably get very little usable code. The GPL is old, and companies have had lots of time to work around it.