OS X and others have leeched off BSD and made billions, yet every December, this year being the same, FreeBSD has to whip out the begging bowl to raise funding.
Yes, some large corporations employ some of the FreeBSD folk, but what would happen if they stopped employing them? Would FreeBSD be able to build a strong community of developers to accelerate development? I doubt it.
Linux is in a much healthier place and I attribute much of that to licensing as well as technical excellence. The GPL has helped foster an active community around Linux, one that does not allow corporate vultures to simply scavenge off the best bits and usurp direction of the project.
I think BSD lost momentum because of the AT&T litigation back in the early 1990s and that momentum helped and continues to help Linux achieve the success that it has.
It is possible to praise Linux without burying BSD.
I'm pretty sure the ftp.exe client program had some BSD bits at one time. There might have been some small things like that. Nothing big.
There were a few little odds and ends that popped up with BSD license notifications over the years, like the ftp client IIRC. As you say, little utilities that don't amount to much. What is YOUR point?
Something to consider, which I should point out because your new, is that without BSD you wouldn't have OSX. There's a little BSD in everything (even windows). Another worthy article you should definitely read which explains that BSD is the The single Greatest Piece of Software Ever, with the broadest impact on the world, was BSD
http://www.informationweek.com/whats-the-greatest-software-e...?