Choosing an operating system for new technology can be crucial for the success of any project. Years down the road, this decision will continue to inform the speed and efficiency of development. But should you build the infrastructure yourself or rely on a proven system? When faced with this decision, many companies have chosen, and continue to choose, FreeBSD.
Few operating systems offer the immediate high performance and security of FreeBSD, areas where new technologies typically struggle. Having a stable and secure development platform reduces upfront costs and development time. The combination of stability, security, and high performance has led to the adoption of FreeBSD in a wide range of applications and industries. This is true for new startups and larger established companies such as Sony, Netflix, and Nintendo. FreeBSD continues to be a dependable ecosystem and an industry-leading platform.
↫ FreeBSD Foundation
A FreeBSD marketing document highlighting FreeBSD’s strengths is, of course, hardly a surprise, but considering it’s fighting what you could generously call an uphill battle against the dominance of Linux, it’s still interesting to see what, exactly, FreeBSD highlights as its strengths. It should come as no surprise that its licensing model – the simple BSD license – is mentioned first and foremost, since it’s a less cumbersome license to deal with than something like the GPL. It’s philosophical debate we won’t be concluding any time soon, but the point still stands.
FreeBSD also highlights that it’s apparently quite easy to upstream changes to FreeBSD, making sure that changes benefit everyone who uses FreeBSD. While I can’t vouch for this, it does seem reasonable to assume that it’s easier to deal with the integrated, one-stop-shop that is FreeBSD, compared to the hodge-podge of hundreds and thousands of groups whose software all together make up a Linux system.
Like I said, this is a marketing document so do keep that in mind, but I still found it interesting.
It’s worth considering where FreeBSD is right now (almost everywhere, but below the radar) without much of its own “marketing” given that Linux gets the vast majority of any press coverage.
So, yeah, it’s no surprise that the FreeBSD Foundation — who’s job is to support and tout FreeBSD — is trying to highlight what it thinks might be attractive features to those who weren’t already aware of FreeBSD.
I always found BSD to be a more cohesive platform. Linux suffers greatly from it’s fragmentation, and i believe it’s a point overlooked by many. FreeBSD however, provides a well integrated core that is proven to be solid and consistent.
I really never understood how Linux became so dominant. It seems that everything Linux does, FreeBSD does better.
> I really never understood how Linux became so dominant.
The GPL license appeals to more people, and companies (that give code).
Distro soup is crazy, so many people re-inventing the wheel and fixing the same problems ad nauseam… but also massively appealing as people like to do things their clubhouse’s way (where the clubhouse is the distro).
tux2bsd,
I think there are way more companies like apple who would prefer BSD licensing over GPL, but the side effect may be that there is less sharing. Forced sharing may produce more FOSS source code.
Balmer’s “linux is a cancer” remark had bad optics for microsoft, but still many don’t want a license that forces them to publish their modifications. Hell even redhat, one of the most iconic FOSS companies, has started taking issue with releasing code under the GPL under IBM’s ownership. Copyleft licenses can conflict with corporate profit motives.
Yeah, I’m guilty of this as well. My personal reason for choosing linux over bsd was simple, linux had better support. FreeBSD’s is a cleaner and less chaotic OS, but for better or worse the popularity contest is very real and linux benefits from being the most popular as it becomes a defacto choice.
Ya, about that…
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1245643/worldwide-leading-open-source-licenses/
tanishaj,
Your link is behind a paywall for me, so I have no idea what the data you linked to shows.
I assume you did not do this on purpose. Statista.com are sneaky bastards and they know how to trick people into linking to content that isn’t public. In the past they’ve tricked me into linking their ads on public forums as well.
> I really never understood how Linux became so dominant.
In one word: timing.
In more words: Linux was starting to gain attention while BSDi was mired in the lawsuit by AT&T.
No one wanted to deal with BSD while there was a possibility that it might be “owned” by AT&T. Which left Linux as the “safe” legal free alternative.
See “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars”
Also “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories%2C_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design%2C_Inc.”
So Linux’s popularity could be attributed to AT&T’s greediness.
Ironic, no?
This is 100% my view as well. Linus Torvalds himself has said that, if he knew about BSD at the time, Linux would probably never have existed. Linus did know about GNU which is why his first announcement about Linux said that it “won’t be big and professional like gnu”. He knew about GNU but GNU did not have a kernel. GNU was a popular software suit that ran on UNIX systems ( including Minix which Linus had used and first set-out to duplicate ). If Minix had been free ( free of cost ), Linus would probably have just used that instead of creating Linux as well.
Linux did not mention GNU when announcing Linux because of the GPL either. Linux was not initially released under the GPL. In fact, at first he did not like the GPL because he wanted Linux “free as in beer”. He had to be convinced that it was ok to charge for copies of Linux ( as distribution required physical media back then which cost money ). The GPL, you will notice, explicitly says that you are allowed to charge money. After being convinced to let people charge money to share Linux, he changed the license to GPL. The license did not create the interest in Linux. Interest in Linux drove the change in license.
The other big factor, which I guess is what Eric Raymond pointed out, is that Linus created a very effective distributed development model and organization around the Linux kernel. The timing of the BSD lawsuit gave Linux a window to become popular even though BSD was more mature but, by the time BSD became on option ( lawsuit resolved ), Linux had the amazing momentum that it enjoys to this day. Had Linux have evolved more slowly, BSD may have pulled back ahead in the early days. At that point, people still saw considerable value in “real” UNIX which BSD was ( and is I guess ). Today, nobody really cares about being a “real” UNIX. POSIX is still a major thing but honestly “Linux” compatibility is really the POSIX standard these days in terms of access to the vast application ecosystem that has evolved around Linux. Look at the Linux compat layers in BSD and Haiku for example. Look at the interest in supporting “Docker” on other platforms.
FWIW the BSD folk were also greedy on their own, after different teams set to commercialize the original BSD tranches. And the entire BSD ecosystem has traditionally had an insane ability to shoot themselves in the foot and sabotage each other.
AT&T didn’t help. But even without the lawsuit the whole BSD landscape was a bit of a dumpster fire on its own. So Linux would have happened anyway.
Gonna have to ask for examples of those claims about any BSD ‘dumpster fire’.
From what I can remember, BSDi was the only real attempt at commercialization.
Lot of wasted effort between the BSD/386 . 386BSD, OSF, et al. BSDi basically was charging commercial licenses for the open source tranche off the Net/2 codebase. While OSF/1 took those costs up to the stratosphere.
And before that there was the whole unix wars of the 80s. Where there were all sorts of different BSDs going at it.
BSD has always been a dumpster fire in terms of lack of cohesion, branching off, and finding 10 different ways of wasting effort on the same problem. Which is why Linux with a “benevolent” dictator at the helm that got things done and squashed dissent, IMO, was inevitable.
Xanady Asem,
Don’t you sense the irony here? It just seems a funny thing to criticize BSD over. Consider that if you replace ‘BSD’ with ‘linux’, your description fits perfectly into The123king’s comment from earlier, nobody would bat an eye…
You are entitled to your own opinion
Xanady Asem,
We can agree on this 🙂
“I never understood how Linux became so dominant”
There is a “timing” reply below that I totally agree with. But you may find this interesting:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050727225542530
“RMS was a very strong believer — wrongly, I think — in a very greedy-algorithm approach to code reuse issues. My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and make a kernel. I knew the code, I knew how to do it. It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today.
RMS wanted to work together with people from Berkeley on such an effort. Some of them were interested, but some seem to have been deliberately dragging their feet: and the reason now seems to be that they had the goal of spinning off BSDI. A GNU based on 4.4-Lite would undercut BSDI.
So RMS said to himself, ‘Mach is a working kernel, 4.4-Lite is only partial, we will go with Mach.’ It was a decision which I strongly opposed. But ultimately it was not my decision to make, and I made the best go I could at working with Mach and doing something new from that standpoint.
This was all way before Linux; we’re talking 1991 or so.”
— Thomas Bushnell
Thomas Bushnell founded the GNU kernel project ( HURD ):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bushnell
I don’t know about “way before Linux” as Linux was announced in August 1991 as well.
If the above is to be believed, BSD bit off its nose to spite its face. Back in the day, a GNU userland on top of a BSD kernel would have been unstoppable and it is easy to believe we would all be using it today.
tanishaj,
These points aren’t mutually exclusive and it’s likely a combination of factors. Personally I do think if BSD could have won on merit, but it was a victim of unfortunate circumstances and by the time it got sorted linux was already at the front.
Linux became dominant because it wasn’t tainted with the Unix lawsuits of the late 80s/early 90s.
Linux had an edge in terms of how it was structured and managed as a project. So it had a much faster and agile development process.
Linux was also a much more scalable, and portable, kernel than FreeBSD.
So other than ZFS and the ports collection, FreeBSD ended up having little to no value proposition compared to Linux for most applications.
I said this as a person running a FreeBSD server at home. But in production, at work, I wouldn’t even bother with it at this point.
Xanady Asem,
This is kind of a mixed bag. Linux is chaotic and akin to the wild-west of operating systems. At the beginning this can be appealing because nobody really knows where things are headed and you can cover a lot of ground. But as technology matures I think the merits of BSD’s engineering are beneficial. What’s holding the BSDs back isn’t technical merit so much as the lack of critical mass and support. It is what it is.
LInux is not chaotic in the least. The development and roadmap of the kernel being highly regulated is one of the major reasons why it has gained so much traction in industry.
Xanady Asem,
You are entitled to your own opinion.
You’re being deliberately obtuse. You know full well he’s saying “Linux” in the wider sense of GNU/Linux Distributions.
For the most part GNU/Linux and its Distributions became dominant because of the GPL license. Also because the Linux kernel development outpace everything else.