True, hence why so many products are built on top of FreeBSD. But for organizations not shipping Linux binaries the license doesn't change much. Also Linux is a pretty awesome operating system so it doesn't make much sense for lot's of organizations to switch to FreeBSD even if there are some advantages to using FreeBSD.

Anecdatum; I'm moving our CentOS/RHEL Linux systems to FreeBSD over the coming two years.

Databases/Fileservers/Firewalls/Webservers etc;

So it's making a comeback, at least in my 11,000+ person org. :D

I do feel like it has a comparative advantage in all of those spaces. ZFS, jails, and pf are all killer features for all of those spaces. The only possible draw back is it requires your IT staff know the technologies. What a company saves on licensing easily makes up for the staff wages though...maybe.

Good to hear! FreeBSD is my favorite OS and I wish I could use it at work, but were a CentOS/RHEL and Windows shop. However the security team has a handful of FreeBSD servers going, so it is used.

>But for organizations not shipping Linux binaries the license doesn't change much.

hmmm.. Android, Chromebook, Smart TV's, Routers, set-top boxes, NAS etc, these all ship Linux binaries, so I don't think it's a big issue.

If you do kernel space modifications which you want to keep as a 'competitive advantage', then going with something like FreeBSD instead of Linux would make perfect sense, otherwise I don't see why the license would matter much.

It is the pain of complying with the license. You have to ensure you have everything in place just in case someone asks for the source code. It isn't hard, but it is effort that nobody wants to do yet you have to. It isn't good enough to say "we use version 1.2.3 unmodified download that from the internet", you actually have to have a copy of version 1.2.3 ready to send out (apparently in case the internet deletes all versions of source code 1.2.3).