Often times companies using BSD find it in their best interest to contribute back. Sometimes very publicly with lots of publicity, other times privately with almost none. People working at Sony have contributed changes over the years to the FreeBSD project, but I have no idea if they are connected to the PS4 or not.

Often times companies using GPL'd software find it in their best interest to not distribute the code. Just try to get the full sources to the kernel on many of the cheap tablets. You can't, despite this being a clear violation of the GPL. Tracing back to the maker of the chipset through four layers of resellers, rebranders and middlemen is hard.

Then again, I've made millions of dollars in my career having made my naming giving away my source code in FreeBSD. I don't feel like free labor for anybody. I do FreeBSD to scratch an itch, and if people can use it great. If they give back even better, but I don't get dogmatic about it. If people want something specific, then my consulting rates kick in: that's the only time I let others control the pace, direction and scope of development.

Apple has contributed lots of patches back to BSD. Juniper has contributed much to BSD, etc.

In general, people that use BSD contribute patches back because it is in their best financial interest to do so. Not because the license says they must, but because they want to. This generally leads to better quality patches too, in my experience.

But don't expect the video driver: that's likely covered by NDA with AMD...

Some companies give to the 503(c)3 as their donations, while others donate code and/or developer time. The latter can add up to a quite substantial amount if you look at the total cost it takes to develop something, rather than just the relatively small cost to integrate the patches upstream. The larger companies make modest cash donations to the foundation, records show, but make even larger donations in code to the project. Many of these donations don't necessarily show up in the commit log as being from $LARGE_COMPANY, but instead show up as individual FreeBSD committers that are paid to put the code into FreeBSD, or small consulting houses that large companies sometimes outsource work to.

Warner

Having worked on FreeNAS and its commercial counterpart, I can tell you that iX Systems, the folks behind FreeNAS, give quite a lot back to FreeBSD. There is much code flowing back into the project from them, they sponsor many FreeBSD developers to attend various events, they leverage their buying power to get cheap/free servers for the project.

Juniper Networks did a port of FreeBSD to mips, and contributed it back, as well as substantial support for different arm and PowerPC platforms.

Yahoo has contributed many things back to the project over the years.

And the lest goes on and on. There is a mutually beneficial relationship between the community, the corporations that use it and the project. To speak otherwise shows a woeful ignorance of reality.

Well, if it truly is without a license, you cannot even download it to look at it. Copyright law is quite clear: if you have no license, you cannot copy it. Full Stop.

The phrase "All Rights Reserved" is a totally meaningless phrase. It used to be required to retain certain rights in central american countries. It was created by the Buenos Ares convention, and once everybody in central and south america adopted the Berne convention, the phrase no longer had any recognized legal meaning.

It has falsely been asserted that the phrase "All Rights Reserved" makes the Berkeley Copyright statement non-free. This is false because the copyright notices from the Berkeley Unix code base date to a time when the phrase had meaning.

It's only use today is due to inertia.

In short, this article is quite sensational in its ignorance.

Also lacks an MMU... These chips have been available for quite a while, as have designs based on them...

... skynet lives and it is testing its metal...

Retention time in 2003-time-frame flash is tens of years. Retention time for the latest 25nm flash is measured at one year. Much less if you wear it out. Your 8MB SD card likely hasn't had the level of cycling needed to see reduced data life.

It is one device to the user. It is a metric boatload of NAND flash under the covers. But then again, all flash drives are some fraction of a metric boatload of NAND parts under the covers..

When I ask the question, I don't expect perfection. Or error free. I expect someone to stumble through it. It gives me a chance to observe them in ways that they aren't normally observed. It gives me insight into how you think and how you approach the problem. Those things are more important than if you get your ';' right or not: the compiler will tell you when you botch that. It will also show me how you react when you make a mistake, how well, or poorly, you take criticism and how well you can communicate with me, what your style is, etc. There's a lot more going on in the interviewer's mind than playing 'cc'...

Then you are a loser and I don't want to hire you. Your attitude sucks.

I've been using whiteboards all my professional life. I have to use them to explain ideas to others, and have others explain them to me. If you can't express a simple idea of, say, implementing an in-order linked list insertion, then you're useless for my team. How can I expect you to explain the complicated algorithm you are working on? How can I expect you to give an informal talk about your latest work to the team? How can I expect you to socialize ideas that you have to other engineers if you can't whiteboard them?

When I ask candidates to code for me, it shows me how they think. I don't care about all the ; being in the right place, or if you misspell strtok strtoken. I care about how you can clearly explain what you are doing and walk me through your thought processes. If you don't know, say so. If you don't know and try to BS me in the interview, you'll try to BS me when I ask why your code is late or broken. The whiteboard programming for me is more about how they approach things, how they think through them, how they test the code to make sure it is right, how they weed out bugs, how they respond to my "what if someone passed in NULL here?" etc. They don't need all the answers right, but they do need to demonstrate they can think on their feet and take the right sorts of approaches to things.

And besides, you'd be surprised how many people can't write simple in-order insertion code. Or reverse this list. Or count the number of 'w' that are in a string passed in. Or, well, you get the idea. While I like to have "hard" questions, I rarely get to them because these simple ones catch up so many people so badly that I end things early. I make things hard because I want to judge you on a scale of 1 to infinity. When people complained about a calculus teacher giving really hard tests, he responded "well, I don't want to make them too easy. After all, everybody in this room is taller than this pencil, but it doesn't tell me anything useful about them if that's my the only metric."

"Honey, does this security system make my ass look fat?"

Actually, the work is transformative. The form of the facts was changed from the form in the book to the form in the database. Creativity was certainly involved there.

But that misses the point. It is 100% legal to copy phone books verbatim with no transformative work because they are just tables of facts. It isn't clear that these tables of facts even qualify for copyright protection at all, since they are very similar to telephone numbers and addresses listed in phone books.

Actually, it will. I've read data off of hundreds of old 3.5" floppies over the years. Using recovery programs like rescuedisk from FreeBSD or ddrescue I've found maybe two dozen of those I was actually able to read the data with enough retries, on the order of 1000.

A couple I've not been successful with, but I've been able to read the troublesome sectors if I try reading it on other drives enough times.

Maybe I've been lucky. I used to believe that if you couldn't read the media after 10 retries just give up, it is gone forever. But I accidentally left a disk running for a weekend once and found from the logs that it recovered all but 10 sectors on the first or second try, 5 more on the third, 3 more on the forth, one on the 453th try and one after 894 tries.