gtewallace

Now word is Amazon initiated this. Amazon, the company with $50B invested in OpenAI as it prepares for IPO.

I've worked in open source for two decades and something that I've observed that I think is as close to a law (as in law of physics) as anything I've seen is the 90 | 9 | 1 ratio.

90 percent of any community - the Hacker News community, reddit, x, or any open source community - will be passive consumers.

9 percent will be contributors - as the reply below says, through feedback, testimonials, bug reports and the like.

1 percent will be creators - new features, innovations, fixes.

This is the way it is. "Freeloading" is a very very unfortunate term and I wish it had not been inserted into the popular lexicon. The creators of open source that I know WANT their software to be used.

I work at the FreeBSD Foundation. There are a couple points I'd like to make. First, FreeBSD support in Ansible and Salt is very good. There is work to do on K8s, but runj represents a great start and there are a bunch of resources available on how to use FreeBSD for cloud native. Last, I think your final point that "[FreeBSD] should not be the default choice for a production deployment" could be worded better. I gather your meaning is "...for a general purpose enterprise deployment". Assuming that’s what you mean, FreeBSD limitations that make it difficult for general purpose enterprise use is something I have heard and that I am personally involved in trying to improve. To me, that's different from "production deployment". There is a long list of production deployments of FreeBSD at the infrastructure and device layers - routers, VPNs, firewalls, storage systems, hosted security solutions, industrial control systems, CDNs, payment networks, and embedded devices.