Is Sony Abusing FreeBSD with Playstation?

The intersection of open-source software and proprietary systems often sparks debate, and Sony’s Playstation is at the heart of a current controversy. This article delves into the complexities of Sony’s use of FreeBSD’s MIT License for its Playstation operating system, examining whether this constitutes an abuse of open-source principles.

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[shinobi]

No. Because the BSD license gives full freedom to anybody who uses it.

[QuintonDolan]

Many companies have been using FreeBSD instead of Linux to build their products for decades because of the license terms, and have professional engineers with intimidate knowledge of the system. Fixes and enhancements make their way back to the base system one way or another because it’s a lot easier than maintaining an internal fork. It isn’t always public knowledge because many companies don’t want their competitors knowing what they are doing, or how they do it.

[AmirZaimMohdZaini]

How about Nintendo? They are using FreeBSD as their platform for their Switch console operating system.

[samjiman]

Isn't the BSD license pretty similar to the MIT? They can use it commercially without contributing changes but they need to acknowledge that they used it.

[tibbydudeza]

JunOS from Juniper Networks is based on FreeBSD - they acknowledge it and support the FreeBSD Foundation.

[iamionscat]

Please turn off the motion sickness background. PLEASE

[tony-tegd]

I do think GPL > MIT any day of the week, but hey, if a project IS MIT licensed you have every right in the world to use it.

[kodefood]

I've developed quite a lot of open source code under the more permissive licenses, like the Apache, BSD and MIT licenses. I can say that I've never expected users of that code to contribute back to it. If they do, that's great, but I chose those licenses for a reason. Sony can do as it pleases, as did Apple. It's a testament to the FreeBSD code base that companies would want to use that as a foundation for their products, and I have to imagine the FreeBSD developers are proud of that.

[NeillPowell]

TL:DR. BSD is THE Grandfather platform for Modern high-performance computing. BSD is THE "almost-operating system" that the world has relied on. It's no surprise Sony would use it as a platform, it makes utter sense. Why not use a robust, tried, tested vetted and secure base system, having been improved on, over the span of 40+ years? Unix has strong "do's and dont's" and if you wanted functionality, you had to code it and have that code scrutinized by everyone and then some. Too much to go into. But if you wrote code for 1+1=10 (bin), it would be scrutinized on how you got there, what registers were used, and if there was a way to do it better and faster (and today, more securely). and THAT is why BSD works as well as it does. Imagine if Boeing (yikes, I know) only ever built 1 aircraft, and the iterations thereof only added stable, reliable, mature and robust technological features. not more comfy seats, not in-air entertainment, just raw-metal and flight control and speed improvements. No Microwave ovens, no in-flight facilities, just utter, secure reliability. Imagine aviation having other Aircraft like a Gulfstream, but their Pilots keep saying, "yeah, but it's still not a Boeing". "Yeah, that's a nice lighter, but it's still not a Zippo". BSD simply works, and it's good to get companies to give back to the real Alpha-God-nerds that merely want a tiny thank-you and more hardware to carry on making BSD better, not fancier, or prettier, just better. True Altruism.

[-_chs_]

"Abusing"?
BSD license makes software free as a bird. Everyone can do with it what they want.

[Being_Joe]

BSD license is not MIT (though practically the same). Many companies that use FreeBSD (like Apple) rather people not know what code they are contributing back so there is a assumption that they just take and don't give.

[lavavex]

Sony has abused me by having games only run at 30fps on PS5

[rmccombs]

I never owned any Playstation, but I thought the biggest problem people had with Sony and Playstations was the time they disabled the Other OS feature on PS 3. More recently they almost took away TV shows that people thought they had "bought".

[RafaCoringaProducoes]

Chris there is still timing to do a thumbnail with sony executives with bsd horns

[michaelvivirito]

One of the beauties of FreeBSD is it's license

[mindblow]

FreeBSD is MADE for this purpose, to give full control to whoever uses it, there's no stealing nor something in between, this is not GNU/Linux with CopyLeft or something with CopyRight licenses, all you have to do is to say you are using BSD

[frustratedalien]

It is all about the license. If the license allows it, you can do whatever you want with that piece of code/software. I didn't know anyone was really talking about Sony abusing FreeBSD, tbh. Kinda surprising that someone would know about the existence of FreeBSD but not understand how its license works 🤷‍♂
As an aside, FreeBSD uses the 2-clause BSD license afaik, not the MIT license. While MIT is very popular amongst open-source software enthusiasts, I only know of two major pieces of software that use an MIT-derived license - zsh and X11.

[katrinabryce]

LLVM was mostly funded by Apple - MacOS is another operating system that is based on FreeBSD.

[roymarron]

Nope, the BSD license was specifically made so you could make a profit from it, Contrary to the GPL license Richard Stallman create because he didn't like the MIT license. BSD is not Linux lol.

[robonator]

the big thing a lot of people miss is that there are three questions
1 : justified legality
2 : justified morally
3 : ought to be justified legally
Calling a random person on the street a dickhead is legal, not moral, and should be legal. (unprovoked once-off insults aren't harassment, it's just being a dick) Breaking into someone's house is not legal, not moral, and should not be legal. If you go back and time slavery was legal, was not moral, and should not have been legal. Posting spicy memes is increasingly illegal, debatably moral, but should be flatly legal as it doesn't affect anyone. Stopping in to stop someone from killing someone else can actually be illegal depending on the exact laws and circumstance, but it's entirely moral and should be legal.

The point though is that it's not just "yeah this is legal *_technically, _* but it's still immoral" because the MIT specifically exists to guarantee that third category. The only reason you license anything under a permissive license is because you, as the developer, are saying "anyone can use this, whether I like it or not". That also more or less nullifies the second category because the developers explicitly chose to allow anyone to use it even if they wouldn't have liked to give permission.

The entire thing around "X company is just abusing open source!" is 99/100 times just used as a way to polarize people into "BIG COMPANY BAD" blind hatred, without actually saying anything substantive. Unless you genuinely want to do something insane like ban permissive licensing because you think it's for developers' "own good" to stop them from licensing their work permissively, the only conclusion even the worst cases can come to is "It's legal, it should be legal, there is no solid moral basis to condemn it on, but I just find it personally icky and would like if they gave more back" which isn't really, well, anything. Worse than that however, it doesn't even really achieve the desired goal since the best way to get companies to contribute back isn't by saying "y'know I wish you would though" it's to give reasons why it's beneficial from a business perspective to do so. So, ironically, making the discussion all about personal objections regarding the entirely subjective percieved morality of it as opposed to the hard realities is actually directing the conversation *_away_* from what could actually lead to more contribution.

We saw the same exact sort of blind frenzied hatred and righteous indignation around 'live service games' where it practically turned into a slur, then Helldivers 2 releases and "no no, they're not *_all_* bad, Helldivers 2 is just one of the good ones". Instead of looking at what the games actually were and analyzing how to make them better, people jujst got a pithy name to pin it under and started using it as a self-defined derogatory. The same thing happens in the opposite direction, "RIGHT TO REPAIR" is a lot more common than looking at how repairability factors into the balance between value and profitability which must underpin any stable system. For instance, not being easily repairable means that indirect revenue from the product increases, that also means that for equivalent profit the company can sell the product at a lower price (directional causality is really impossible to establish here, both directions are equally as valid, 2+2*2 == 2*2+2, one doesn't imply the other they just *_are_* equal) so a responsible owner that keeps their device undamaged ends up paying less for the same experience. By the same token since it's more expensive to repair them, high quality devices are going to be less common in the second hand market and go for more, so that responsible owner can actually get an even *_lower_* price factoring in reselling later. It can't be simplified to "BIG COMPANY BAD", yet that's exactly what a lot of these conversations explicitly try to do.