That was my thought too, not a great argument. I don't pay Oracle because my Bluray player runs Java, Sony pays Oracle to use Java and I pay Sony for the Bluray player. I don't even need to know it runs Java, it's included in the purchase price.

Likewise I shouldn't need to know Netflix uses FreeBSD, or the PS4 uses it, or Nintendo uses it. My users don't know my software runs on Heroku, they're not being asked to give money to DHH for Rails or become a Postgres sponsor or donate to the Linux Foundation just because they use a product that uses that technology on the back end.

If you make a product that directly profits from the work of a non-profit, you should consider a donation to keep the project around. But if you just use a product that's built on an open source project in a non-transparent way and don't actually use the open-source project yourself but you're still donating to it, you would be a very generous citizen.

If FreeBSD didn't exist, Nintendo and Sony and Netflix would use something else. If companies that use FreeBSD want to keep using FreeBSD, they're the ones who should be paying for it.

It's a little much to ask that everyone donate to every open-source project they happen to use in an incredibly incidental way. I'd be spending half my time hunting down projects and the other half cutting checks to them. I donate to projects I actually use.

Remember it is not about Netflix, Sony and Nintendo getting something for free, it is about ANYONE being able to get it for free, no matter who they are and what they want to do with it. Also, don't forget that some of these companies, like Netflix, for example, do contribute to the project, both in money and in code. But again, this is not the point - next time you'll be lucky and create Netflix 2.0, you'll be able to use FreeBSD code to your business advantage too!

Netflix gives back major fixes and performance improvements to the community because maintaining their own fork of the OS permanently is a nightmare.