Re: [dpdk-dev] Beyond DPDK 2.0

[Jay Rolette <rolette@infiniteio.com>]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 2:47 AM, Luke Gorrie <luke@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