I don't believe that disagrees with what I said, but if there's any confusion in terms of how it was worded, thanks for the clarification.

Perhaps it depends on how you distribute "vanilla" across the "or"? I read it as "(vanilla BSD) or FreeBSD" but perhaps you meant "vanilla BSD or vanilla FreeBSD"

I don't agree that 'the people that matter know' is necessarily accurate, I also don't think it's sufficient. FreeBSD depends on donations and people donate for a mix of reasons. For example you can successfully brag about donating to "Linux" because even in non-tech circles people know Linux is cool. But even in tech circles people don't know much about FreeBSD.

Not that donations as a from of conspicuous social responsibility makes sense from a rational point of view, but we're humans and there are many situations where we spend money just so people see us do it.

No, I'm really just talking about common dumb statements you see on tech sites like "Mac OS X is just *BSD with a pretty GUI". When in reality they've been maintaining their own fork for almost 20 years now, for serious technical reasons.

Keep in mind that both BSD Unix and CMU/Mach were funded by the government in order to advance the state of the domestic computer industry. In terms of successful government research projects, these two would have near top of the list!

That being said, it would be great if "FreeBSD" had a bigger brand (and perhaps wasn't seen as Apple's vassal.) But I think that has more to do with the fact that Linux effectively beat them to market versus any license logic.