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> It may be part of the reasons why FreeBSD has way less users than it could and should. I would like to gain understanding as to why the BSD maintainers + dev

> It may be part of the reasons why FreeBSD has way less users than it could and should. I would like to gain understanding as to why the BSD maintainers + developers invest the time they do into their projects. They are awesome projects, but... who are they for? The 0.1% of people who lie to themselves saying "FreeBSD makes a great desktop/laptop?" Mac OS X makes a great laptop, that's why it is in every coffee shop around the world. Linux must beat BSD server usage 10:1, if not 100:1. I'm sure somebody below will prove me wrong but I strongly feel it's just the echo chamber effect of reddit/Hacker News. I can't think of any good reasons somebody would use *BSD over Linux and "their man pages are great + the clib is written in the same repo as the kernel + userland utilities" isn't good enough of a response for me.

jsiepkes 7y ago
> I can't think of any good reasons somebody would use *BSD over Linux Well one reason could be that you are a commercial company and you make a proprietary appliance. FreeBSD's license (3 clause BSD) is way easier in that case then the GPLv2, let alone GPLv3 (which a lot of userland is licensed in most Linux distro's). Examples of some high profile appliances running FreeBSD: Sony's Playstation 4 and Juniper's Junos OS which runs on their firewalls and routers. Ubiquiti is getting a lot of flak for not being GPL compliant and the only thing I can think of when I hear this is: "Why did they use Linux if they wanted to make a proprietary product? They wouldn't be in this mess if they had used FreeBSD.". Another reason could be FreeBSD ships ZFS out of the box because combining the CDDL + BSD licenses is not a problem. However GPLv2 (Linux kernel) + CDDL is a problem.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  > Well one reason could be that you are a commercial company and you make a proprietary appliance Any other use cases other than licensing that would make somebody want to use *BSD instead of Linux/Mac?
  - aranjedeath 7y ago
    Yeah, it runs better. I've used FreeBSD on my production systems instead of Linux since I started this whole bit 15 years ago. Linux surprises me. FreeBSD, for example, does not. I do not walk away from production FreeBSD systems and have them fall over for reasons other than hardware failure. Full stop.
- trasz 7y ago
  And this shows in lots of places, from gaming (Linux is nowhere, meanwhile the most popular console runs FreeBSD) to enterprise routers (Juniper) or NAS (NetApp).

jsiepkes 7y ago

> I can't think of any good reasons somebody would use *BSD over Linux Well one reason could be that you are a commercial company and you make a proprietary appliance. FreeBSD's license (3 clause BSD) is way easier in that case then the GPLv2, let alone GPLv3 (which a lot of userland is licensed in most Linux distro's). Examples of some high profile appliances running FreeBSD: Sony's Playstation 4 and Juniper's Junos OS which runs on their firewalls and routers. Ubiquiti is getting a lot of flak for not being GPL compliant and the only thing I can think of when I hear this is: "Why did they use Linux if they wanted to make a proprietary product? They wouldn't be in this mess if they had used FreeBSD.". Another reason could be FreeBSD ships ZFS out of the box because combining the CDDL + BSD licenses is not a problem. However GPLv2 (Linux kernel) + CDDL is a problem.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> Well one reason could be that you are a commercial company and you make a proprietary appliance Any other use cases other than licensing that would make somebody want to use *BSD instead of Linux/Mac?
- aranjedeath 7y ago
  Yeah, it runs better. I've used FreeBSD on my production systems instead of Linux since I started this whole bit 15 years ago. Linux surprises me. FreeBSD, for example, does not. I do not walk away from production FreeBSD systems and have them fall over for reasons other than hardware failure. Full stop.
trasz 7y ago
And this shows in lots of places, from gaming (Linux is nowhere, meanwhile the most popular console runs FreeBSD) to enterprise routers (Juniper) or NAS (NetApp).