On the BSDs being “corporate friendly”

I read another post recently that took it as given that the BSD operating systems were corporate friendly, with the implication that this was bad. They claimed that companies can lift code and lock it away in their proprietary software. That’s true, they can. From a permissive perspective though, the GPL does the same thing. Importing permissive code into a GPL’d repository is a one-way street. The BSDs are corporate friendly in the way bananas are friendly to people named Jeff. Aka, they’re friendly to everyone. Well, unless your name is Jeff and you’re allergic to bananas, which would suck. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-12.