The could, but the license leaves them equally able to say "fuck you very much" on donations or code.

That is the wonders of the BSD license and others that follow the same principles, profit for free from the work of others without giving anything back.

> That is the wonders of the BSD license and others that follow the same principles, profit for free from the work of others without giving anything back.

Does any Open Source license require monetary donations from companies using the code?

Sony and Apple and a lot of other companies using BSD licensed software DO give back -- in the form of code and employing developers to work the projects.

I'd be interested in a list of software that Apple and Sony contributed back to FreeBSD and that is in the ports, do you have such a list? It looks like that this is a very asymmetric relationship.

For Apple, there's quite a lot if you're willing to grovel through commits, but at the moment nothing is bigger than Clang/LLVM -- a large chunk of the core team is directly employed by Apple, and with FreeBSD 10 Clang is directly incorporated into the core system. Apple has, at various times, employed other FreeBSD core committers directly. They very quietly have done a lot to support the project.

Sony, IIRC, employed some Japanese committers who were working on ACPI at one point.

A few trees don't make a forest.

Wow, GPL zealots sure are direct with their dishonesty these days.