> Also, it's a Linux mailing list and he maintains a BSD distro, not much in common.
No, you're thinking of linux-distros@. linux-distros@ is where issues that affect Linux only go. distros@ covers issues that are relevant to both BSD and Linux - distros@ membership is FreeBSD+NetBSD+linux-distros@.
You may not be interested in license differences, but many downstream vendors are. Several have a "No GPL-3 code past the front door" policy, and others would even like to not have GPL-2 code near their products. FreeBSD's active progress towards being entirely GPL free is very appealing to these people.
FreeBSD has made significant progress here, and 10.0 is on-track to be GPL-free for all tier-1 platforms, including:
* Clang/LLVM rather than GCC
* New BSD licensed toolchain
* New text processing tools (sort, grep, etc)
* bsdtar - since picked up and used by several other operating systems
Quite the opposite, in fact. NetApp have contributed BHyVe (http://bhyve.org/ / http://wiki.freebsd.org/BHyVe), a full BSD-licensed Hypervisor, in the last year. They make regular contributions to several network card drivers and other low-level code. At least one or two FreeBSD committers are full-time members of NetApp staff.
No, you're thinking of linux-distros@. linux-distros@ is where issues that affect Linux only go. distros@ covers issues that are relevant to both BSD and Linux - distros@ membership is FreeBSD+NetBSD+linux-distros@.