Dell (now) owns Isilon (through purchasing EMC), and they do contribute back a lot:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneFS_distributed_file_system

You can search for "Sponsored by:" in commits for who did work:

* https://www.freshsource.org/commits.php

They are donors to the FreeBSD Foundation in addition to committing patches:

    $ git log | grep -i '@dell.com' | wc -l
    86

> grep '@dell.com>'

A better search may be 'Sponsored by:.*[Dell|EMC|Isilon]' or some such.

Some Dell folks may be committers and be pushing things with their @freebsd.org address.

Thank you. I naturally am very attracted to the permissive licensing, but time and experience of seeing huge companies take permissively licensed code and use it to make, make billions without giving back anything or anything of substance, and comparing that to how the Linux kernel has evolved, has made me really consider whether GPL isn't needed. That debate is forever ongoing, of course, but it greatly warms my heart to see that Dell is contributing back. This seems like a success story of permissive licensing.

Seems a fair question given this quote:

"FreeBSD’s BSD license offers customization flexibility without the obligation to disclose proprietary enhancements."

But I suppose maybe some of their less sensitive changes, if upstreamed, relieves them of having to own them.

> But I suppose maybe some of their less sensitive changes, if upstreamed, relieves them of having to own them.

General best practice is to (a) upstream as much as you can, and (b) keep as close to -HEAD (the development branch) as possible. Some discussion on this at the Vendor Conference from a few months ago:

* https://freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/event-calendar...

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLugwS7L7NMXzSalaF4l_7...

Basically: if it's not part of your secret sauce, upstream it.

In addition to the vendor summit, Netflix gave a tech talk recently where they recommended both upstreaming and keeping as close to -CURRENT as possible

"Why we run FreeBSD CURRENT at Netflix": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4TZxj-Dq7s

It seems like they have some (minor) contributions planned at least based on that article: "Improving FreeBSD’s Linux application binary interface (ABI) will allow a broader base of Linux applications to run seamlessly on ThinOS, enhancing its versatility and appeal."