The FreeBSD Foundation does get some monetary support from both commercial users and end-users; some commercial FreeBSD users (e.g., Netflix, Juniper) have core

The FreeBSD Foundation does get some monetary support from both commercial users and end-users; some commercial FreeBSD users (e.g., Netflix, Juniper) have core developers on their payroll, so they indirectly contribute in that way instead. FreeBSD also benefits when companies release or contribute to other BSD-licensed, open-source projects, since that code can then be used within FreeBSD itself. Apple's (and Intel's) contributions to Clang/LLVM are a prime example; another is Apple's open-sourcing of launchd, the FreeBSD port of which was just relaunched (no pun intended): https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd But yes, as some GPL proponents will point out, there are companies who use FreeBSD for their commercial products without contributing back. In the end, they probably lose out as much as anyone though, due to the cost of paying developers to maintain a completely separate codebase.