It is absolutely in their interest to help. But if people expect companies to just write a driver for X operating system, that’s not realistic. And if you could just port the Linux drivers, sure, that would be easier, but it wouldn’t change the fact that device makers still have the be able to prioritize where to put their resources. And laptop FreeBSD users is probably really low on most lists.

What I would like to see however is maybe some specific wifi chip or USB/thunderbolt Ethernet adapter that is certified to work well with FreeBSD - for testing purposes and as a mobile network tool it would be useful to have a laptop running FreeBSD in a VM that could communicate over that dedicated piece of hardware. This would make it super convenient to test a bunch of physical hardware or do all kinds of other infrastructure work while remote.

There is nothing to disagree here.

You're shoving in GPL ideology where none was asked for. No one is asking to do free work for corporations; this is a flimsy straw man. You're welcome to do what you feel, I was stating the fact that FreeBSD has done the world a lot of good. That's hard to refute even in the worst of assumptions. And that's not saying anything about GPL. It has its place.

I personally regard copyleft as a severe curtailing of options and equate it with being forced to adopt a narrow, ideological worldview. Worse, the GPL perpetuates the fundamental atrocity of intellectual property law, by hacking it, and therefore intrinsically depending on it; in contrast, the BSD and MIT licenses are mostly a liability waiver under an assertion of attribution, ultimately creations more of necessity than ideology.

In the context of abjuring exploitative corporations, I hear an echo of trade unionism, a movement often oblivious to its own reinforcement of capitalism, again by depending upon the thing it purports to confront; few entities are more aligned with the moral sentiments of Adam Smith than a trade union engaged in collective bargaining. And so it is with the copyleft licenses and their implicit support for enforceable intellectual property rights.

The article linked appears to be derogatory, emotive, riddled with false equivalences, and relies on invective as a substitute for rhetoric. Rather than finding it compelling, it think it describes a myopic, narcissistic view of both intellectual advancement and the value of unfettered contribution.

So the reason we are not seeing say open CUDA drivers from NVIDIA for Linux is that they instead distribute closed ones for permissively licensed operating systems such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Illumos, MINIX, Plan9, etc.? Which (apart from all lacking CUDA drivers) all universally have less support from hardware manufacturers both when it comes to open and closed drivers across the board? ERRNOLOGIC.

You are aware that FreeBSD got closed NVIDIA graphics driver support about a decade after Linux? It is also the only operating system with a permissive license that I am aware of NVIDIA ever supporting.

Alternatively, are you trying to refer to that some game consoles used FreeBSD as a basis and had proprietary NVIDIA drivers written for them? You are aware that there is nothing stopping them from doing exactly the same thing with Linux?

You are free to believe in “licensing magic” being a solution as much as you want, but I think that you will find that it all has much more to do with what NVIDIA is ultimately all about: Shipping as many cards as is humanly possible while maintaining a borderline monopoly maximising profits.