FreeBSD: 'We're Still Here. (Let's Share Use Cases!)' (freebsdfoundation.org) 107
31 years ago FreeBSD was first released. But here in 2025, searches for the Unix-like FreeBSD OS keep increasing on Google, notes the official FreeBSD blog — and it's at least a two-year trend. Yet after talking to some businesses using (or interested in using) FreeBSD, they sometimes found that because FreeBSD isn't talked about as much, "people think it's dying. This is a clear example of the availability heuristic.
The availability heuristic is a fascinating mental shortcut. It's how product names become verbs and household names. To 'Google' [search], to 'Hoover' [vacuum], to 'Zoom' [video meeting]. They reached a certain tipping point that there was no need to do any more thinking. One just googles , or zooms .
These days, building internet services doesn't require much thought about the underlying systems. With containers and cloud platforms, development has moved far from the hardware. Operating systems aren't top of mind — so people default to what's familiar. And when they do think about the OS, it's usually Linux. But sitting there, quietly powering masses of the internet, without saying boo to a goose, is FreeBSD. And the companies using it? They're not talking about it. Why? Because they don't have to. The simple fact that dawned on me is FreeBSD's gift to us all, yet Achilles heel to itself, is its license.
Unlike the GPL, which requires you to share derivative works, the BSD license doesn't. You can take FreeBSD code, build on it, and never give anything back. This makes it a great foundation for products — but it also means there's little reason for companies to return their contributions... [W]e'd like to appeal to companies using FreeBSD. Talk to us about your use case... We, the FreeBSD Foundation, can be the glue between industry and software and hardware vendors alike.
In the meantime, stay tuned to this blog and the YouTube channel. We have some fantastic content coming up, featuring solutions built on top of FreeBSD and showcasing modern laptops for daily use.
These days, building internet services doesn't require much thought about the underlying systems. With containers and cloud platforms, development has moved far from the hardware. Operating systems aren't top of mind — so people default to what's familiar. And when they do think about the OS, it's usually Linux. But sitting there, quietly powering masses of the internet, without saying boo to a goose, is FreeBSD. And the companies using it? They're not talking about it. Why? Because they don't have to. The simple fact that dawned on me is FreeBSD's gift to us all, yet Achilles heel to itself, is its license.
Unlike the GPL, which requires you to share derivative works, the BSD license doesn't. You can take FreeBSD code, build on it, and never give anything back. This makes it a great foundation for products — but it also means there's little reason for companies to return their contributions... [W]e'd like to appeal to companies using FreeBSD. Talk to us about your use case... We, the FreeBSD Foundation, can be the glue between industry and software and hardware vendors alike.
In the meantime, stay tuned to this blog and the YouTube channel. We have some fantastic content coming up, featuring solutions built on top of FreeBSD and showcasing modern laptops for daily use.
What is this the matrix (Score:2)
I click on the link that say blog, I get a XML file with this content at the top
>>This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
And then the rest of the XML file, I'm expecting a HTML file.
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It's an RSS feed. RSS support has been removed from most web browsers, so you will need an RSS feed reader as a separate application.
pfsense firewall (Score:1)
So VoIP, some games and similar stuff won't work as well.
wifi support sucks too (not important for my firewall stuff).
Xerox? (Score:2)
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I thought I heard a coworker say "Xerox" recently. Do people only use "photocopy" or "copy" now? I know we still use a bunch of paper in our office but I haven't noticed what terms coworkers use.
Use case (Score:1)
Hosting 4chan, of course ;)
By the way (Score:5, Informative)
You can take GPL code too, modify it, and not give back your contributions. Just keep your modifications for your own use, without publishing them to other people to see.
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You can also take GPL code, modify it, sell it to customers and keep the code yourself. Done that for 25 years now with great success. Most companies don't want me to give them the source to prevent it ever getting to their competitors. And their employees don't have rights to request for the source as the license allows the company/organisation to act as the entitity for them.
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The approach you describe violates clause 3 of GPLv2:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
Option c only applies to non-commercial distribution of a binary that you got in that form. GPL v3.0's Section 6 has a similar set of requirements, with additional permissions for things like peer-to-peer sharing.
If you don't originally provide source code with the binary (option a) then you must be willing to provide the source code to any third party (option b).
Re: By the way (Score:2)
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Can you translate that to English?
If someone -- either an individual or a company -- gets source code under the GPL, and then destroys every copy they have, they may be in practice giving up various rights to redistribute (or for GPLv3, to offer the software as a service) to third parties. It depends very much on whether they can satisfy the redistribution requirements. They would still have the right to use the software for their own purposes. Destroying the source code would in practice tend to make it
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You can also lock up BSD code in the name of "open source". Take some BSD code, shove it in some GPL code, and now that BSD code is GPL.
Any changes to that BSD code can no longer be given back to the original BSD project as those changes are GPL.
GPL can lock up BSD code just as well as commercially licensed code can. Usually even more so since GPL zealots always claim you can "lock up" BSD code in a commercial license which makes the GPL superior, despite the GPL doing just that as well.
No. (Score:2)
Take some BSD code, shove it in some GPL code, and now that BSD code is GPL.
No, you cannot re-license BSD code as GPL code without express permission from the author.
However, some BSD licenses [gnu.org] are compatible with the GPL. [gnu.org]
Any changes to that BSD code can no longer be given back to the original BSD project as those changes are GPL.
In order to keep the changes made GPL, all modifications must be expressly identified/isolated (e.g. a diff file). Changes to any published file are reasonably assumed (even if you didn't intend it) to be under the original file license. Simply declaring "any changes from the original are GPL" is legally insufficient.
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No, you cannot re-license BSD code as GPL code without express permission from the author.
However, some BSD licenses [gnu.org] are compatible with the GPL. [gnu.org]
Actually you can. You can fork a BSD project, using a different name, and then close the source, or re-license the code under another license.
The only thing is, if the BSD in question had some attribution clauses, you have to respect those. That's how, a long time ago, Microsoft was able to put the BSD IPv4 Netcode into close source Windows.
Ditto with MIT, apache
FreeBSD blog claims they're still there (Score:4, Funny)
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If Netcraft ever disappears, how would we be sure?
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Re: You should probably do a hardware survey (Score:1)
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Thank you. Apple and Microsoft shouldn't be the judge of what hardware is a "shitbox"
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Well, MacOS X is built on top of FreeBSD. I used to download and build updated libraries because Apple only updated them with major OS releases. That annoyed the hell out of me with graphics drivers, as they never included nVidia EXT and I had to basically write my own headers based on public ones for Windows. On that note, the graphics engine I worked on at the time was the only one I know of that supported nVidia extensions on mac, and it was free for anyone to use, even in commercial games (and it was, b
systemd refugees (Score:2, Redundant)
When your favorite Linux distro gets infected by systemd, you can:
1. Flee to slackware
2. Flee to freebsd
3. ?
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I fled to Devuan. There have been few pain points and the system generally works well.
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Same here, Devuan is the spiritual successor to Debian.
My first choice trying open source back in the day was FreeBSD, and used it almost exclusively at home until I had to use Ubuntu for a new laptop because of hardware support. Later I upgraded to Debian to slim down the desktop.
I stick with Linux because of BTRFS, and no, ZFS doesn't have the flexibility with regard to disks and configuration changes that BTRFS has. It made replacing faulty disks a simple task without risking my data integrity.
If there c
Re: systemd refugees (Score:2)
I'm still on Debian with most systemd stuff removed. I may migrate to Devuan in the future.
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My experience is that there is nothing on that list that is important or I would care to use. Tomcat was the software on that list that could possibly be considered significant, imho.
My network hub, on Devuan, has only 91 running processes, and uptime: 193 days. I have so
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This is what I did. What people need to consider is writing a functional replacement to systemd, perhaps split its functionality up into smaller modules with very detailed security in AppArmor and SELinux, so if one module gets compromised, the damage is tough to spread.
However, for now, it is there, and has a few nice features, so might as well move on.
I still wonder if systemd's code has ever been audited though, especially recently. Just seems ripe for a remote root hole somewhere in that huge mass of
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Get work done, not waste time customizing or working around things like systemd.
I left Ubuntu because my system had a boot problem that wasn't showing up in the logs because systemd, so I would have had to use a debugger to figure out where the problem was. I couldn't get work done until I worked around systemd. What I learned about systemd is that it's shit.
What's saddest about systemd is that a bunch of the ideas are good, but everything was done wrong.
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi... ? (Score:1)
I am confused by all the BSD flavors. Other than the lack of Theo The Rat, how is FreeBSD different from the other *BSDs?
Also, BSD is a unix derivate from the 1970s. There have been 55 years of knowledge that has made Linux a server-grade OS. What has been done with the *BSDs?
If someone can point to a writeup or history that describes
- differences between those OSs
- evolution through the last half century
- compare the BSDs and -- if appropriate -- to modern Linux
That would be really useful.
I seek to lear
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FreeBSD - the best supported one with a focus on running on PCs. Some of the userland is used in Apple's Mac OS X and I suspect they contribute back as a result, if indirectly.
DragonflyBSD - the most interesting one, with a modular kernel design modeled on AmigaOS. (Alas not remotely similar to AmigaOS in any other way...)
OpenBSD - the one with an effort made to ensure it's secure out of the box (though any software you install afterwards may have security issues.) As an aside, despite Theo's prickly reputa
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Good point. For all Theo's faults, he has a talented developer group and a vision that almost inherently develops useful projects for the rest of the community that often it didn't know it needed.
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Linus took the king's schilling and now he works for a committee. Theo told the Great and the Good to go pound sand, so he still gets to run his own project. That right there is all the reason I need to prefer BSD to Linux.
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Oh wow, those look interesting! Alas the only MIPS boards I have are routers (I have plenty of unused routers, but I'm not sure I can install these on them!)
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I'm going to go about splitting hairs here.
UNIX, as in official, trademarked UNIX flavors are macOS, AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX. Technically, others are unix-like operating systems. However, these days, this is just historical trivia. The trademarks and certifications are expensive, and tend to matter for bean counters.
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are splits from Jolitz's 386BSD... not to be confused with BSDI's BSD/386. These are "true" BSDs, from the 4.4 BSD Lite code base, after the lawsuit that separat
vice as virtue (Score:3, Insightful)
Unlike the GPL, which requires you to share derivative works, the BSD license doesn't. You can take FreeBSD code, build on it, and never give anything back. This makes it a great foundation for products â" but it also means there's little reason for companies to return their contributions...
Yes, that's exactly why Linux won.
[W]e'd like to appeal to companies using FreeBSD. Talk to us about your use case... We, the FreeBSD Foundation, can be the glue between industry and software and hardware vendors alike.
No, you can't. They only chose your code because they don't want you involved after they got it. You have no further reason to exist to them since they got the download. They don't want you and they don't want to give you anything. The GPL literally had to come into being because of the deficiencies of permissive licenses.
Re:vice as virtue (Score:4, Interesting)
they don't want to give you anything
There is a great deal of BSD/MIT/FreeBSD-alike licensed open source to which people and organizations contribute in various forms. OpenSSH, PostgreSQL, LLVM/Clang, X.Org, Wayland and many others come to mind.
Since your premise is flawed, I can't accept your attribution as to why Linux "won."
That makes me ask why Linux has indeed won. I can't answer that. If you put a gun to my head, I can cite at least one thing I know really mattered, and I don't think you're going to like it. Back in the day, when FreeBSD and Linux and the other open source BSDs were all capturing mind share and growing rapidly, something extraordinary happened. That something was Oracle.
The day Oracle blessed Linux as an officially supported OS, everything changed in the IT business world. It really did. It made hardware vendors reconsider their indifference toward Linux. It made PHBs think about the cost of their UNIX licenses. It legitimized Linux at a fundamental level.
Its still odd to me that Oracle made that choice. The first time I ever ran Oracle on a non-commercial OS, it was on FreeBSD, because FreeBSD had (has?) an SVR4 compatibility layer. That feature meant it was possible to run the X86 Solaris version of Oracle, and it actually worked.
If that's not enough and the gun is still at my head, I'd say it was the development eco-system. Linux was, then, less rigorous in what could be merged and from whom. Linux was able to adapt to more platforms more quickly, and drivers were more complete.
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Multiple major contributors have let us know that they chose to contribute to Linux over BSD specifically because of the license.
Corporations also favor it — remember, everyone and their mom used to have their own BSD — because the other participants have to give back.
Linux was well and truly accepted before Oracle ran on it. Oracle chose to do that because they had no choice about whether to do it, only when. It was clear that Linux was eating Solaris' lunch just like gcc killed acc. Clustering
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That makes me ask why Linux has indeed won.
Better name.
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In the early 90s AT&T sued Berkley Software Design because BSDs originated with AT&T Unix. This led to distrust of the BSDs at the precise moment where Linux rose.
I think there were other factors. Red Hat and SUSE certainly drove adoption of Linux and I don't think any of the BSDs had an equivalent corporate engine driving adoption forward. Then there's the marketing aspect. Once Tux started showing up Linux really started being seen as a viable "brand." That may seem silly but branding works—
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USL sued, AT&T had sold the rights by then.
Moreover it was over before Debian Linux existed, and around the same time Slackware came into being. The first release of Red Hat didn't come out until two years later. The only people in 1993 who were using Linux or BSD were hobbyists, and the only people who might have worried about 386BSD being tainted were freeware distributors, and they seemed to have no problem distributing 386BSD anyway, I remember the ads.
Businesses didn't really start to get heavily i
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In the early 90s AT&T sued Berkley Software Design because BSDs originated with AT&T Unix. This led to distrust of the BSDs at the precise moment where Linux rose.
Part of it. It was a stumbling block out of the gate. I tried the Jolix BSD (before all the others) and it didn't work on my 486. Linux did. FreeBSD and BSDi didn't exist quite yet. I didn't look at the BSDs again for 10 years. By that time I had introduced Linux into my work (I was a sysadmin). I was lucky to work at a place that used OpenBSD for firewalls and FreeBSD for web servers. Linux was everywhere else.
I think there were other factors. Red Hat and SUSE certainly drove adoption of Linux and I don't think any of the BSDs had an equivalent corporate engine driving adoption forward. Then there's the marketing aspect. Once Tux started showing up Linux really started being seen as a viable "brand." That may seem silly but branding works—it instills curiosity in potential consumers and trust among those who make purchasing decisions.
Sure. Some wouldn't touch FreeBSD because of the Daemon mascot
I would never argue that the license had nothing to do with the success of Linux, but I do not think its success was dependent on the license. At the time, people had a lot more faith in the GPL than they do today and it certainly drove a lot of developers to Linux.
Linux was easier to contrib
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I take it that you haven't given the
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This is all true, but the kernel itself is arguably the most critical component. If you can't get it to run on your hardware, you're not going to run it. And the "team" around Linux fought most to make sure proprietary modules weren't practical, legally or technically, to ensure manufacturers were forced to publish technical documentation allowing open source device drivers to exist.
It's true much of the software running over Linux wasn't GPL licensed, but there was far less urgency. If someone had forked X
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Sounds like an emotional reason, so maybe that is the right answer. Often people don't care to admit the real reason as that's a different part of the brain. But who knows.
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But who knows
I don't, and I said as much. You don't either. You, meaning all of you.
Someone pointed out that Linux was well established and in the lead among the open source operating systems at the time Oracle decided to adopt Linux as an officially supported platform. That's true, so it isn't a open and shut case at all.
Back then though, FreeBSD had enough following that had Oracle picked FreeBSD instead, and perhaps made an OracleBSD (as they've done with their own Linux distro since,) where would we be now?
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Oracle made it possible to question managers about the costly stacks of "proprietary" UNIX platforms from Sun, HP, Digital, etc., without looking to Microsoft. Other major software vendors followed Oracle's lead to Linux as well. One of the most despised and contemptable software companies in the world made a game changing contribution to Linux. That part I know with certainty. I was there and I watched it happen. I watched Ellison in-person on a stage in San Francisco as he talked up Linux, and Oracle â" running on cheap Dell server hardware â" was demoed. That opened a lot of eyes, and thousands of IT people went back to their jobs across the US with Linux as a option for their problems.
Not entirely disputing this premise. But I want to point out that Oracle bought Sun in 2009, and took control of it in 2010. Oracle on Linux happened fully a decade before that in 1998.
Which begs the question... Why? It's simple really... All the big Oracle installs were still on Solaris with 64+ CPU servers and 144-bit ECC memory. Oracle needed those customers. IBM DB2 was a phone call away, just sign on the dotted line and an army of IBMers would show up and clean out your bank account and kick Larry
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Corrections:
By 2009 it was 288-bit ECC memory.
more specifically didn't not accept their "offer"
Should read: 'more specifically did not accept their "offer".'
MS apparently owns the patent on grammar Nazi API's.
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A long time ago I read that around the time Linux was getting started, the BSD/UNIX wars were putting a legal cloud around any BSD derivative. IIRC, Linux started a year or two before FreeBSD. This gave Linux an early first-mover advantage, which proves to be quite important. I would also say the Linux had a bit more desktop/multi-media support, which helped adoption. FreeBSD also had low-cost competition from Wind River or something like that, that had a BSD derivative.
Oracle was just one more company to u
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Mac OS X only has some of the FreeBSD userland, it's not really a BSD operating system in any practical sense of the term. A non-BSD kernel, non-Unix-like user interface layout, defaults to a file system that's not Unix originated, uses a different start up system and daemon manager which looks more like SystemD than bsdinit, and even the file system layout is very, very, un-Unix-like.
It's great that Apple are using those tools, but I've never really understood those who see Mac OS X as a "Unix", it's very
BSD and Me (Score:5, Informative)
My main reason for using BSD variants is the extreme stability of the operating systems and relative infrequency of remote attack openings in their default installation configurations. These BSD-based firewall/router distributions perform quite well managing my 400mbit Internet data transfers on relative modestly performant small form factor single board computers.
Uses (Score:3)
NetBSD: saving old hardware from the landfill
OpenBSD: when you're sufficiently paranoid on your network edge
FreeBSD: fast ZFS and embedded/dsdicated systems where you distribute proprietary linked code. Large photocopiers and such. Also pfSense, et. al.
I'd be tempted to try FreeBSD ZFS again now that it has native encryption. I lost a huge zpool to known bugs in GELI last time I tried.
I'm on linux now but there are major performance issues that are still tagged Open on Github and that's after sitting down with a calculator to make custom settings to eliminate a half dozen 'edge case' performance problems. At least I can opt in to the legacy algorithms that aren't buggy enough to OOM the server (regardless of how much RAM one adds).
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I find it a hard choice, if I were choosing a NAS OS. The main reason why I have wound up going for Linux in general, is the support and tools available. Technically for a NAS OS, maybe FreeBSD is best with their ZFS, perhaps even Solaris, but I've been running ZFS on Ubuntu for years without issue, using snapshots for backups [1].
[1]: I pop a snapshot, then have Borg or Restic back up that mounted snapshot directory, as opposed to using binary images, just to make restores faster.
FreeBSD is what all servers should run (Score:2)
FreeBSD powers my personal infrastructure and has for decades. It is easy to use, not bloated (too badly, though you now have to take steps to keep that damn Wayland out of a server, WTF, but you can with /etc/make.conf). Having eventually made the shift to Poudriere, the package and code management is very good. Fixes for maintained packages are an overnight thing, but some of the major upstream dependencies have the same level of responsiveness as in Linux - better than any commercial software, but not
So ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlike the GPL, which requires you to share derivative works, the BSD license doesn't. You can take FreeBSD code, build on it, and never give anything back. This makes it a great foundation for products — but it also means there's little reason for companies to return their contributions... [W]e'd like to appeal to companies using FreeBSD. Talk to us about your use case... We, the FreeBSD Foundation, can be the glue between industry and software and hardware vendors alike.
So ... it's almost as though this is an advantage of the GPL? :)
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The BSD license is more "do what you want with the code" whereas the GPL is protective of the next guy down the line
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BSD if one wants ideas or standards to spread. e.g. encryption, network stacks, etc. Linux if one wants code to spread. e.g. everything else, etc.
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The GPL definitely has the advantage if your goal is to try and foster an active ecosystem around a code base. You know, so you don't have to go begging for people to come back to you with use cases when people just take your code and run with it.
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The GPL definitely has the advantage if your goal is to try and foster an active ecosystem around a code base. You know, so you don't have to go begging for people to come back to you with use cases when people just take your code and run with it.
You got my point :)
Is there any real uses for it? (Score:3)
Outside pfsense type use, is there any real reason to use BSD instead of Linux? Mostly companies just want something that runs their webservers or dockers whatnot. BSD doesn't make it that much better and has worse hardware support. Even more so with AI workloads.
The only real benefit I see is lack of Systemd, that is a great win for sysops.
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For FreeBSD, having ZFS integrated into the base system is a pretty big advantage. Itâ(TM)s really simple to have ZFS on root, and it makes for a hell of a NAS server.
It's really simple with Linux, too. Ubuntu lets you just do it from the installer, including encrypted root. When I left Ubuntu for Devuan (just to get away from systemd really) I followed the instructions on the official site for Debian, but on Devuan. That worked with only predictable (sysvinit vs systemd) changes. Now I build my own ZFS package from master and Linux from the source tree, currently 6.14.6, so I'm super duper up to date all the time. I started doing newer kernels for drivers, and then I go
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Web-servers has historically been an easier propsition on it also (fast sendfile support).
The biggest issue is usually developers on Linux having a "works on my machine" mentality so much software requires a bit of porting effort due
to different headers and some minor differences in syscall/signal behaviours. (90% of the time you can add an #ifdef __FREEBSD__ or similar for l
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I like the more conservative approach of how FreeBSD is developed. Also jails for security. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/bo... [freebsd.org]
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I've wound up moving to OPNSense for my main firewall, from PFSense, although these are on dedicated devices. Overall, in theory, it might be better to use a BSD because it has a different set of bugs than Linux, so something that is a kernel level issue would be stopped by that.
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I think BSD administration is easier, and much more UNIX like.
For example, If you want to use a static IP instead of dynamic, it is a very simple one or lines to change. And it stays the for years, if not decades.
With Linux, first you have to consider which distro you are using. Then there is a systemd way of doing things, and a UNIX way of doing things.
I find BSD more straight forward and consistent.
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Currently, BSD is my backup plan if anything seriously unfortunate happens to Devuan. Which, there are two major potential points of failure there: the upstream distro, and Devuan itself.
Obviously Netflix (Score:4, Informative)
And probably some other CDNs use it too. Easy to setup, consistent over the decades, and performant. But that consistency part is the biggest benefit - with Linux distros changing literally everything that already works for no reason (and usually poor documentation), it is refreshing to have some stability in this world.
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Yes, Playstation 4 and 5 OSes are customized forks of FreeBSD. IMHO the most successful use case of FreeBSD, but strangely omitted here.
Nintendo Switch OS is mostly proprietary, and only uses some parts of FreeBSD code.
I couldn't find much about Huawei's OS.
Something wrong with their graph (Score:2)
https://trends.google.com/tren... [google.com]
FreeBSD is basically flat-line dead is what I'm seeing.
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Look here: https://trends.google.com/tren... [google.com] FreeBSD is basically flat-line dead is what I'm seeing.
For most usage, it is.
And yes, those who do use it will chime in to disagree. By all means do, but for most of us, it isn't on the radar.
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Using BSD tools is not the same as being a BSD operating system. Anyone who's used Mac OS X can tell at a glance it has almost nothing in common with FreeBSD for example, it has some FreeBSD userland tools which is a nice to have, but the GUI, start up manager, default file system (yeah, UFS is an option, I don't think anyone uses it), kernel, and even file system layout, are completely un-Unix like.
I suspect the BSD based OS most people on Slashdot have used directly or indirectly is pfsense or OPNsense. T
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Anyone who's used Mac OS X can tell at a glance it has almost nothing in common with FreeBSD for example, it has some FreeBSD userland tools which is a nice to have, but the GUI, start up manager, default file system (yeah, UFS is an option, I don't think anyone uses it), kernel, and even file system layout, are completely un-Unix like.
It might not be Unixy, but MacOS is UNIX, since 2007, starting with MAC OS X 10.5. The only exception was Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, but compliance was regained with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. I'm not certain what the deal was with OS X Lion.
BSD is in there, but it isn't a whole OS, just tools as you note.
And as I noted, those who disagree will chime in.
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Ever here of Darwin and MacOSX? that's built on FreeBSD. And everything from elevators to printers use a BSD. Core security tools were built on BSD and ported to Linux, you're using BSD project code all over the place.
That does not make MacOS BSD, it means that MacOS uses some BSD tools. A lot of us were under the impression that MacOS is UNIX 03.
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Yeah, remove Linux and take the line back a bit, and it looks even more horrific: https://trends.google.com/tren... [google.com]
Why my company stopped using FreeBSD (Score:2)
In the mid 2000s I joined a successful startup company. We were bought out by a Fortune 500 company. Because of a severance agreement that still has a little while left to run, I'm not going to name the company as my agreement doesn't allow me to "talk bad" about them on social media. So it's just easier to not mention their name. We were bought out because the For
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I was going to run OpenBSD on my laptop but the wifi card wasn't supported. It was a minor variant of another NIC and the only thing that needed to change was some values, no code at all. The card was supported under Linux. Although it's been well settled for quite a while that you can copy such information from Linux drivers and use it in BSD, they decided not to because of copyright reasons. So I run Devuan.
I tried to use OpenBSD for a firewall a while back, when I was working for a web company and we nee
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I was working for a company during the early 2000s that spun up FreeBSD servers because supposedly MySQL performed better on FreeBSD. Then it was decided that MySQL wouldn't work for us, so that was the end of the FreeBSD machines. We were spinning up different stuff and trying it all the time. It was fun if you liked getting paid to learn and try different things, but people with kids and financial responsibilities hated it because they could tell the company was going to lay them off and go under because
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I remember visiting a very similar company in the mid-2000s. They had figured out a way to run FreeBSD on AWS (it wasn't supported by Amazon back then). The IT leadership was fanatically obsessed with FreeBSD.
We had interesting conversations about the POSIX multithreading, or lack thereof, in FreeBSD.
Interesting to hear they eventually taxied over to Linux.
I use it (Score:2)
As my ZFS file server for all my media and also use the https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve [freebsd.org] feature to run a small VM for a pi hole. My router is an old core2 small desktop machine running OpenBSD that keeps chugging along.
BSD HW Support (Score:2)
I love FreeBSD, I started using it in 1995, one full year before Linux.
Forget about desktop and small servers use. Both for xBSD and Linux, big server and Embedded is where is at. Desktop/Laptops belongs to Windows and MacOS, and Cellphones belong to iOS and Android...
Well, guess what, HW support for Linux is bigger than for xBSD.
In emebeded, every single SoC maker will make drivers for every single SoC component for Linux, for xBSD, well, not so much, some of them will, some of them will not, which makes m
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If you've got to say it (Score:2)
Is it really (still there)?
Who and Why? (Score:2)
Who uses FreeBSD (Score:2)
Where I don't run FreeBSD, and won't, the desktop, because although it supports Wayland, Gnome, KDE, XFCE and comes with plenty of great software, it just doesn't slide into my workflow as easily as Linux does. Which is why it's g