Release engineering team lead at FreeBSD commented on reddit that Sony would actually fund a bunch of development work that went into FreeBSD proper rather than just their fork, but do it super under the radar (mostly because they don’t want competitors knowing what they’re up to in future versions, particularly in terms of hardware support). Netflix contributes tons to BSD and uses it not because of the license but because of the networking stack, as they wouldn’t have to disclose shit if they did run Linux, it’s all on their servers. Apple funded development of LLVM (which many other large corporations have also contributed to).
Source on the Sony and Netflix part, can’t link directly to the comment because new reddit ui sucks and I can’t access old without logging in anymore
It’s not as one-sided as that comment makes it seem (see my reply to them). Many corporations do contribute back or fund development, especially since it’s easier and cheaper to do that than to maintain a hard fork for all their changes. Hell, with Linux, despite GPL, they could still run a bunch of proprietary code on your device through modules since those don’t have to be compiled into the kernel and thus aren’t bound by the kernel’s GPL.
With something like a video game console, if your whole operating system is easy to replicate, that makes it much easier for someone to build a copycat OS that lets anyone run that console’s games on non-sanctioned hardware. Wouldn’t need an emulator if you just straight up get the whole OS running on wholly different hardware and modify it to your liking easily and you could probably skirt copy protection too. Hell, it would be GREAT for us consumers. Not so great, however, for companies that spend tens or hundreds of millions developing a new console hoping it will sell tens of millions of units to pay off (and then get a cut on the games themselves).
Instead, we’ve arrived at a sort of hybrid model, where companies contribute to the development of things that aren’t specific to their hardware or whatever they believe their advantage to be, while contributing to things that help everyone, but won’t reveal their “secret sauce”.