12sunflowers
You are right to be skeptical. Money can corrupt projects and fracture people. I watched several FOSS luminaries rise and fall. Some died by suicide or from years of overwork. One erased his identity. Another staged his death. Several became impossible to work with. For many, gaining wealth, and later losing it, was more destructive than never having it. Success did not liberate them, it exposed their limits, and it left deep scars on the very people who built what others freely consumed.
If BSD ever received massive corporate funding, it would indeed risk becoming "Linux#2" or even "Windows#2", bloated, political, and beholden to outside interests. BSD’s greatest strength today lies in having remained relatively small, decentralized, and focused on technical excellence rather than mass adoption.
Still, some funding is necessary to maintain critical infrastructure, expand hardware support, and prevent burnout among the few developers sustaining BSD. The real challenge is not merely accepting funding, but doing so without losing independence, a balance almost no open-source project has mastered once serious money is involved.
Even when funding comes, it rarely reaches those doing the real work. A small circle of administrators typically controls the resources, while most developers remain unpaid, underfunded, and increasingly alienated. The FreeBSD Foundation today reflects this imbalance: it raises significant funds, but most FreeBSD developers still work for little or nothing. To many, this feels less like support and more like exploitation.
The Linux world suffers from similar problems. While corporate sponsorships flood major Linux foundations with money, most independent or small-team Linux developers see none of it. Contributions from unpaid laborers are still the foundation on which billion-dollar companies like Red Hat, Google, and Amazon continue to build their profits. In both BSD and Linux, success often means that developers become the invisible and expendable backbone of someone else’s business model.
Linux thrived because it tied corporate investment to community benefit through the GPL, forcing improvements to stay public. BSD, by contrast, used a permissive license that allowed companies to extract value without returning anything, making it far less attractive for sustained corporate funding, but also sparing it, so far, from some of the worst forms of co-optation.
If BSD were ever to receive serious funding, the community would need to be ruthlessly vigilant, not only to protect the project's technical integrity, but to defend its developers from becoming yet another invisible labor force exploited for corporate gain.
