I was reading a lot of confusion with free software, Linux, Mac and BSD.

First of all... Linux is not free... only the source code is free, so the people call it Open Source you can sell your Linux software or anything else.

There are licenses over the software that says what you can do with it... so I will try to explain the differences:

GPL (Linux): You can use any code available in the repositories, changed it like you want but you need to share in the repositories the new code you made or changed. You can sell your app buy anybody can get your code and compile a app like yours.

BSD: You can use any code available in the repositories, changed it like you want and not share anything about your work. You can sell your app and nobody will never know what code you are using into it or even what new or changed code you did.

Is GPL (Linux) nothing is proprietary... every line of code is Open/Free... in BSD you decide what is proprietary and what is open... you can hide your source code for ever like Windows.

In a easy term... BSD = Linux + Windows in terms of software development... you have both worlds together.

I tried to use general words to explain.

So if your company wants to use the community code but maintain your code proprietary then the BSD is the best option... in GPL you need to share your work.

More to the point OSX is based on NetBSD and like you said, it like freeBSD are just distributions.

Apple's Darwin (top)

NetBSD is used by Apple for a large portion of the user-space commands and tools in their Darwin project, and Darwin is the UNIX-based core used by Mac OS X. NetBSD source tends to pay attention to issues of portability and correctness, and is virtually all BSD licenced, which avoids commercial problems with the GNU General Public Licence. At least one of the Apple developers has access to the NetBSD source tree and has fed back some useful changes.

It is like they wrote in that part... BSD is flexibe for commercial companies... you can decide what part of code you share with the community and what not... you can mix... not all closed like Windows and not all opened like Linux.

So companies like Apple, Sony, etc will always uses BSD over Linux.

Exactly.  I think the thing people do not get is Linux is basically just a "Flavor" of Unix and so is BSD.  Very similar if you have used one of the bunch ( I have put a great deal of time into using OpenBSD/AIX/Linux and for the most part if you can use one you can use the other).

And if interested here is the list of Unix "Flavors"

Edit: Meant OpenBSD not NetBSD

The Unix family tree:
http://www.computerworld.com/common/images/site/features/2009/062009/unix_chart_775.jpg

It leaves out the Adroid/ChromeOS branches of linux... but the android kernel is returning to mainstream even if the display server isn't. And where the heck is Irix (SGI)?

Decent nutshell overview.

^^
Oh my, that family tree makes me feel quite old, the first Unix I used was a SystemV even before Release 4, on a VAX 11/750...   

Before Linux, the ones I used the most were Solaris and HP-UX, respectively on Sun Sparc and HP Apollo workstations.

Yup, old here too.  I used a Vax, but it ran VMS.  Prior to linux I used a lot of Irix, some SCO.  Irix boxes used to be the best thing around for 3D graphics (OpenGl and Open Inventor), if you had the 250K for a good one (40K for a midling one).

I highly doubt Sony would use a modified FAT32. I believe no sane person would run a UNIX-like system on crappy ancient Microsoft filesystems like FAT or NTFS. They may not go with ZFS (which is the greatest "filesystem" I've ever used and what I loved most when trying FreeBSD), but using FAT for the system? That just doesn't make sense to me. It's sad enough that they will probably have to support FAT and NTFS for USB devices (because that means they have to pay royalties to Microsoft)

ZFS is the best of the freebsd stock file systems, it does a lot and has good performance. Not quite the performance of ext4 or BRTFS, but better stability than ext4. ZFS plus some performance tweaking should be amazing (a few versions from now).

ZFS was probably the last great technology contribution Sun Microsystems made to the world of computing before they were absorbed (and largely killed off) by Oracle. NFS, Java, ZFS, the list goes on. Sad day when they were bought by Oracle...