NetApp, Dell-EMC Isilon, Juniper, iXsystems, pfSense, etc:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...

If you follow the commit logs, you'll regularly see "Sponsored by" messages:

* https://www.freshsource.org/commits.php

Not just for the core OS, but also in ports and also drivers (Intel, Chelsio, Mellonox).

FreeBSD in particular has always been persnickety about acknowledging work done on behalf of others. Something that would have prevented the IBM-SCO lawsuit if Linux had used commit/patch tracking from the beggining.

I have been using FreeBSD since 1999, a great OS and i love it, at work i am a Linux system administrator.

One of the huge reasons people use FreeBSD is simply licensing. If you dont want to release any source code simply build your custom app on FreeBSD and only include BSD licensed software. Makes being proprietary simple.

Note, this does not mean any companies that do this do not give back to the project, they do in the way of code commits and sometimes donations.

Companies that do not give back non-secret sauce patches will find they will contribute to their own pain (unless they're big enough to fork and not care about going back).

Isilon did not contribute back for a while, and then the FreeBSD project kept moving forward, and so the patches they kept in-house kept getting bigger and bigger, which was overhead in their development.

They've basically caught up now:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneFS_distributed_file_system#...

Not all EMC systems are FreeBSD; at least the VNX I managed is a Linux derivative

Hence why I wrote Dell-EMC Isilon.

Isilon and their OneFS was a stand-alone company (like Panasas still is). EMC bought Isilon. Then Dell and EMC merged.

It also has a bit of an outdated userland, imported from FreeBSD/NetBSD years ago.

They are using FreeBSD for their CDN appliances that they have dotted around the world, everything else runs on Ubuntu out of AWS.