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> 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 ap
by 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 agoYeah, 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 agoAnd 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).