That's just obviously not true. Check out the commit history on FreeBSD and look at all the contributions from Netflix. Off the top of my head they contributed kTLS and asynchronous sendfile which made it such that a single syscall could send the full contents of a file over a socket even with TLS.
Grepping through the git logs for the "Sponsored by" lines shows these top results:
15925 The FreeBSD Foundation
3738 Netflix
2084 EMC / Isilon Storage Division
1922 Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate")
1733 Dell EMC Isilon
1550 Chelsio Communications
1446 DARPA, AFRL
1421 Mellanox Technologies
1262 Klara, Inc.
784 Arm Ltd
729 iXsystems, Inc.
707 Solarflare Communications, Inc.
552 Netflix, Inc.
477 Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG
473 Microsoft
421 Juniper Networks, Inc.
411 DARPA, NAI Labs
386 Stormshield
385 Microsoft OSTC
384 DARPA
375 NetApp, Inc.
358 Innovate UK
355 DARPA, Network Associates Laboratories
317 Yandex LLC
299 NVIDIA Networking
If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.
What are the equivalent numbers for everything that was ever licenced GPL vs MIT? Neither of us knows but I defy you to even slightly attempt to hint that the world did not benefit from gpl code about a million times more than mit code as a direct result of their fundamental natures.
My post proved that copyfree code bases actually do receive contributions back from the commercial users of their code. Certainly not 100% of users, but the same is true for the GPL. Every company I've worked for after college has used Linux extensively and none of them have contributed back to Linux in either patches or dollars.
Why do you both keep incorrectly referring to the license as "MIT"? The BSDs are under the various BSD licenses, not the MIT license. If you're trying to refer to the whole category then I would suggest using the words "copyleft" for GPL-style licenses and "copyfree" for BSD-style licenses.
> If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.
I would like to direct you to the HN guidelines since this is a clear violation of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Numbers prove or disprove it. Which neither of us has. The fact that everything you showed even fits in a little comment like that compared to the scope of all software actually proves what a joke it was to even try to present this as any sort of argument.
"why do you keep saying MIT?" Oh FFS really? MIT, or BSD, is perfectly understandable shorthand for any of the mit/bsd/x11/etc in a general discussion like this. They are all of a class. How do you know? Because no one has attempted to discuss any fine points here that would make any of those any different from any of the others. You have to go out of your way to say they are different, and then cannot say in what way that matters or changes anything. So why do you yet again pretend an insignificant detail in any way affects the thrust of the argument?
Go ahead and substitute "MIT" with "BSD" or any of the specific "various BSD licences". Ok now that you did that, what changed? The argument was valid or invalid before, and the opposite now?
Linus doesn't agree. He once said in an interview that making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did, [0] and has said that I love GPLv2. I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux because it enforced that you have to give back. [1]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070826212454/http:/www.tlug.jp...
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvaldss-love-hate-rela...
Linux succeeded where BSD was tied-up in a lawsuit[0] from AT&T and the fear of “picking the wrong horse” w BSD under threat allowed Linux to slide into public consciousness and installs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....