If somebody uses some hardware product (e.g. set top box) and doesn't know its Linux, then it's no big win for the Linux community.
I have to disagree there. It may not be a marketing win, but that doesn't mean that there are no other benefits. The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us; whether Johnny knows that his games are running on a daemonic operating system is of very little relevance.
>The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us
Is there a writeup of this anywhere? If stuff has been backported/upstreamed/whatever from the PS4 to the freeBSD kernel that would truly be living the dream!
The fact that the PS4 runs FreeBSD has been written about extensively. The contributions they've made, less so... mainly because most of the work they did was before they announced that they were using FreeBSD, and they went to significant lengths to avoid that information leaking out (e.g., shell companies were set up so that code could be contributed without revealing the ultimate source).
Probably the most easily identifiable contributions are in LLVM; Sony is one of the largest contributors to that project, and it's entirely due to the PS4.
I have to disagree there. It may not be a marketing win, but that doesn't mean that there are no other benefits. The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us; whether Johnny knows that his games are running on a daemonic operating system is of very little relevance.