At the heart of every networking device is an operating system that enables traffic flow. In the case of networking vendor Juniper, that operating system for the past ten years has been JUNOS, a network operating system with its roots in the open source FreeBSD operating system.
Juniper has updated JUNOS every 90 days since 1998.
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Member since:2007-03-14
*Alert* Stallman follower detected in quadrant B.
What you fail to understand is, people are mostly decent at some basic level... Although they made a proprietary product based on the BSD code base, they probably *do* report back to the maintainers.
A lot of commercial users of BSD products are more then willing to contribute back in some way.. but they're not forced to do so at all.
Even if they don't contribute back, they still have the include the licence notices in product documentation.
Edited 2008-07-19 16:21 UTC
Member since:2006-03-13
I have my doubts as to whether Juniper has ever contributed anything at all to upstream FreeBSD. Certainly I can find no evidence of any such contributions after conducting a Google search. The very fact that they're allowed to do this is, to me, a shame. If you benefit from FOSS, it just strikes me as greedy and wrong that you can get away with giving nothing back...
Member since:2005-08-18
Right-o. Good thing that could never happen with the GPL. That surely explains why people here where whining themselves silly last week over how Ubuntu doesn't contribute to the community...
Member since:2007-02-26
Member since:
2006-03-13
...how much the source code for this OS is modded from vanilla FreeBSD. If it's not particularly modded, then the company can be forgiven for not giving back at all. On the other hand, if they've made substantial improvements to the codebase, it really is unconscionable that they would not be giving back. Yes, its allowed under the BSD license, but its not very nice. The fact that the BSD license allows this at all is one of the number one reasons why it stinks as a license.