Being available alongside Linux distributions as official supported OS on major cloud vendors.
Maybe the contributions to upstream could be better, but that is the choice they decided to make.
Isn't that thanks to its license? They literally can be used in closed source software without a word of credit.
* https://www.freshsource.org/commits.php
There isn't much special secret sauce that Netflix has at the OS layer of things, so there's not much reason for them to keep the patches in-house (and then have to maintain as the public source rolls forward). Other vendors that give back are Dell EMC Isilon (keeping their OneFS code private), Juniper, Netgate, etc.
Sony is unique in that it was a one-time fork, and now that the product is out there's not much churn in things.
Most vendors have learned that keeping things in-house just causes pain down the road when you have to re-base with the latest FreeBSD release.
There's a lot of weird reasons why you'd use FreeBSD in storage appliances that I have mixed feelings about.
This is not true of any of the "acceptable licenses" listed by FreeBSD.
https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license/
See: the clauses saying "must reproduce/retain the above copyright".
Yeah, you will see the copyright if you are working at the company. Outsiders would never know it's a fork.
Netflix uses FreeBSD in production on parts of its infrastructure.
Those two alone are pretty nice success stories.
And in addition to those are countless other companies quietly running FreeBSD on their servers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
see e.g. https://youtu.be/Ec4NgWRE8ik?t=700
Of course nextstep borrowed some userland from FreeBSD and I think this is where the confusion originates. The actual kernel is totally different though.
And the kernel space for both absolutely have a lot of BSD code, more than the Mach or IO/Kit portions last time I checked.
Regarding OS-X/macOS:
The fundamental services and primitives of the OS X kernel
are based on Mach 3.0. Apple has modified and extended
Mach to better meet OS X functional and performance goals.
Some portions of the OS-X/macOS kernel are based on FreeBSD however:
The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily from FreeBSD ...
As the above states:
The BSD component of the OS X kernel is complex.
I remember a very early release of Darwin, was interested at the time to see if it would eventually become a standalone product, but it never did. I assume there was a lack of corporate support, much like how Google is now trying to slowly close AOSP via removing core pieces like the dialer.
Can somebody elaborate on FreeBSD's "success"?