Underage Darwin Here's a nice post about how hard it is for anyone to contribute to Darwin, Apple's open source core, particularly if they're under 18. But the *BSD community has always been pretty closed, even though the code is open. A single company must take ownership of all patches if it wants to dual-license the code, which is what Sleepycat does. GNU/Linux has so many contributors, that they probably couldn't dual license even if they wanted to. The under-18 non-disclosure law once upon a time might have protected minors, but in this day and age is just a barrier to entry for young coders.