On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 2:47 AM, Luke Gorrie <luke at snabb.co> wrote:
> 2. How will DPDK users justify contributing to DPDK upstream? > > Engineers in network equipment vendors want to contribute to open source, > but what is the incentive for the companies to support this? This would be > easy if DPDK were GPL'd (they are compelled) or if everybody were > dynamically linking with the upstream libdpdk (can't have private patches). > However, in a world where DPDK is BSD-licensed and statically linked, is it > not both cheaper and competitively advantageous to keep fixes and > optimizations in house? > The main incentive for most companies to support it is that it reduces their maintenance load. It makes it easier to not get "stuck" on a particular version of DPDK and they don't have to waste time constantly back-porting improvements and bug fixes. I can tell you that if DPDK were GPL-based, my company wouldn't be using it. I suspect we wouldn't be the only ones... Jay
