Let me correct that for you ;-)
You raised a good point there though, although I'm not quite sure on corporate GNU/Linux being twisted? What's the example, I can think of things like Oracle Unbreakable Kernel; but I thought that was fully compliant with the GPL and available to anyone (should they want it)?
That's my bad, I meant corporate use of linux (in products) and, again, I'd point at android as the prime example. It's built from the ground up to circumvent the limitations of the GPL. Had the common linux base system not had these licensing limitations, google could just have shipped a system with far more commonalities, and a lot of stuff outside of userland would have benefited from years of google contributions.
Instead, you have a system that does none of this, and in many cases works against the aims of free software. It makes no sense for google to support the FSF ecosystem with android, because they had to build their own ecosystem to avoid the bullshit that comes with shipping GPL based products. same goes for a lot of industrial and embedded products that run on linux. there are even firmwares and drivers that are designed with way more features than the hardware explicitly supports specifically to avoid having to interface directly with GPL code.
So, in linux products, things get twisted to the point that it doesn't make sense to engage with the OSS community your product was based on, because their philosophy and licensing it makes it a lot harder to sell your product.
in contrast, pretty much every BSD product gives back to BSDs, because they don't have to do the engineering gymnastics that google did, and it's a lot cheaper than maintaining their own snowflake fork.
There is at least one company I'm aware of that offers a FreeBSD based general purpose operating with commercial support contracts (a sort of Red Hat for FreeBSD) that GNN overlooked. http://www.xinuos.com/menu-products/openserver-10
They don't get much attention though, and I'm not sure to what degree they play a role in the community. I know they did sponsor one of the conferences not too long ago.
@tkoham What do you think of SmartOS and or Illumos?
Been enjoying Brian Cantrill videos covering different topics.
I'd say SmartOS is great, but better suited as a base to build a commercial solution or product than as a pick-up-and-go type of thing. It's designed as a template to build big-ass infrastructure and byzantine app stuff. Home-gamers are better served sticking to FreeBSD in most cases.
Illumos is interesting for sure, I'll give it that. My understanding is that it's a bit like the gnu or BSD projects of yore, where they're rebuilding solaris (instead of system V) around open alternatives. Their Development model is more GNU than BSD in their 'core only' approach, and more BSD than GNU in the "OK with commercial adoption and involvement" and "Not fanatically trying to enforce ridiculous ideologies" department.
The result is a strange hybrid that's resulted in some interesting projects, like OpenIndiana (Desktop OS), NexentaStor, napp-it, Dyson (a debian port based on illumos core) and SmartOS.
It's an interesting, dynamic environment, a lot of interesting work is getting done there, and it's where you should go if you want to be doing interesting OS development, but it's still in it's infancy.
A simple way to characterize it might be "Linux done right" or "BSD done differently"
