6 ms·

I think the poster is not seeing the forest for the trees. BSD has no real use case except as a way to subsidize giant megacorp development with volunteer work.

by na85 5y ago

I think the poster is not seeing the forest for the trees. BSD has no real use case except as a way to subsidize giant megacorp development with volunteer work. Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS. The areas in which BSD is superior to Linux simply aren't important enough to justify using BSD, unless you are a corporate parasite like Sony and need an operating system with a parasitism-enabling license but don't want to pay for more than a handful of developers. The market just doesn't seem big enough to support Linux and a handful of BSDs, and at the end of the day that's the real reason why BSD appears to be dying, because there's no reason to reach for BSD when Debian and Slackware exist.

wmf 5y ago
Are there any megacorps using BSD other than Netflix?
- onethought 5y ago
  Apple do right?
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    Apple's Darwin is probably better thought of as a descendant of BSD (and other technologies).
- rmwaite 5y ago
  Lots of things build on top of BSD. JunOS for example is the software that powers Juniper network devices and is based on FreeBSD (which depending on the platform may itself run in a VM on top of Linux).
- di4na 5y ago
  Sony ?
- mrighele 5y ago
  AFAIK WhatsApp used to be Erlang on FreeBSD, not sure if it is still the case (maybe, Facebook is a big FreeBSD sponsor)
  - jauer 5y ago
    Several people with some form of FreeBSD commit access (including past members of FreeBSD Core Team) work for Facebook. FreeBSD was at one point (and may still be, I haven't checked in a few years) used in the bootstrap process for FB's ISP-hosted cache clusters (because potential GPL headaches IIRC). It's also useful to test network protocol implementations across multiple platforms (e.g. Linux + FreeBSD) and can be handy if you are working with a standards body that wants to N>1 implementations of a protocol.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  Dell EMC with Isilon, NetApp, Juniper mentioned: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeBSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free... You'll see regular "Sponsored by" lines in FreeBSD commit messages from Intel, Chelsio, Mellanox/NVidia for their products. Also: * https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Sony is pretty notorious for flipping BSD technology into products. The PS2 and PS3 are notorious for having large portions of their software derived from FreeBSD
  - Narishma 5y ago
    Why 'notorious'? Is there anything wrong with the way they are using BSD?
    - Fnoord 5y ago
      I guess because of the Linux PS3 debacle. See the OtherOS entry on Wikipedia [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
      - Narishma 5y ago
        I can't see what that has to do with Sony's use of FreeBSD as the base of their console operating systems.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        I mean, it is definitely germane. Microsoft has always written their own software for their consoles, and Nintendo's history making console firmware is so complicated that they may as well just write it themselves. Building a mass-market console using off-the-shelf components and free software is a little more common now (See: Nintendo Switch running Android on an Nvidia Tegra), but Sony was really the first major console manufacturer to do it. The "notoriety" portion comes from the OtherOS side of things, as the other commenter mentioned. In the PS2 era, you could order a kit from Sony containing all of the software/hardware you needed to turn your PS2 into a reasonably capable Linux machine. To make a long story short, licensing is always a concern and it blew back in Sony's face. The whole "Linux on Playstation" thing is a blemish on Sony's reputation, and it's why a lot of people call Sony the "biggest offender" license abuse.
    - DanBC 5y ago
R0b0t1 5y ago
I tell people who want to make money off of FOSS to license as GPLv3 or AGPLv3. Offer a commercial license for money. Some people see megacorps' aversion to GPL and license as BSD, trying to believe that megacorp will come along and decide to hire them or pay them a retainer, despite the many instances of Amazon, Google, et al. ripping off some random permissively licensed project. There was previously a post on HN about this.
- eecc 5y ago
  So much this, well said. Only issue is with SASS strip-miners muscling you out of your commercial license space. On the one hand Amazon adoption certifies the success of your product, on the other it puts any ambition of financial return to rest.
turminal 5y ago
Giving up on something like that is quite narrow minded. Diversity matters and monoculture is almost never a good thing. The fact that there are open operating systems other than Linux makes Linux better too.
heathjohns 5y ago
While you're right in terms of technical prowess, there absolutely is a use case for BSD: it has a distinct culture with different values. There's a large group of people in technology who don't really care how something works, as long as it works for their purposes. That's set against another group who will put up with incovenience in the name of what they think is "correctness". I genuinely don't want to suggest that either group is better than the other - but they are distinct. Around 2010 I felt that the first group had started to dominate the decisions around the direction of the Linux userland. It was wonderful to be able to switch to BSD, which I sense is used and maintained mostly by the second group. Having an OS that is aligned with your culture is a sort of a "happiness by a thousand cuts": the defaults are already what you would have set them to, you don't have to declutter after the first install and what you do want is in the package repo, your niche use cases get attention when it comes to bug fixes because they're not considered niche in that crowd, etc. When the maintainers think the way you do it feels like they've anticipated your needs - it's presumably the same feeling that Apple-culture people feel when they use an Apple product; like it was made for them. In a lot of ways, technology has mostly become a matrix for competing cultures. From that perspective it's not a matter of what performance edge the BSDs have over Linux, it's about whether there's a distinct enough culture to justify the costs of the duplication of effort. In my mind that distinction has only grown in the last 10 years.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> BSD has no real use case except as a way to subsidize giant megacorp development with volunteer work. Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS. FreeBSD has ZFS in-tree as part of the base system with zero kludges (DKMS, I'm looking at you) and perfect compatibility supported directly by the core devs, as opposed to having to deal with a semi-hostile upstream (KH: "my tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existent", Torvalds: "If somebody adds a kernel module like ZFS, they are on their own. I can't maintain it, and I can not be bound by other people's kernel changes."), and it's the default filesystem out of the box for several releases now with good tooling support around it. ZFS can be hacked into a Linux distro, but it'll always be inferior.

by na85 5y ago

wmf 5y ago

Are there any megacorps using BSD other than Netflix?

onethought 5y ago
Apple do right?
- CharlesW 5y ago
  Apple's Darwin is probably better thought of as a descendant of BSD (and other technologies).
rmwaite 5y ago
Lots of things build on top of BSD. JunOS for example is the software that powers Juniper network devices and is based on FreeBSD (which depending on the platform may itself run in a VM on top of Linux).
di4na 5y ago
Sony ?
mrighele 5y ago
AFAIK WhatsApp used to be Erlang on FreeBSD, not sure if it is still the case (maybe, Facebook is a big FreeBSD sponsor)
- jauer 5y ago
  Several people with some form of FreeBSD commit access (including past members of FreeBSD Core Team) work for Facebook. FreeBSD was at one point (and may still be, I haven't checked in a few years) used in the bootstrap process for FB's ISP-hosted cache clusters (because potential GPL headaches IIRC). It's also useful to test network protocol implementations across multiple platforms (e.g. Linux + FreeBSD) and can be handy if you are working with a standards body that wants to N>1 implementations of a protocol.
throw0101a 5y ago
Dell EMC with Isilon, NetApp, Juniper mentioned: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeBSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free... You'll see regular "Sponsored by" lines in FreeBSD commit messages from Intel, Chelsio, Mellanox/NVidia for their products. Also: * https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html
smoldesu 5y ago
Sony is pretty notorious for flipping BSD technology into products. The PS2 and PS3 are notorious for having large portions of their software derived from FreeBSD
- Narishma 5y ago
  Why 'notorious'? Is there anything wrong with the way they are using BSD?
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    I guess because of the Linux PS3 debacle. See the OtherOS entry on Wikipedia [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
    - Narishma 5y ago
      I can't see what that has to do with Sony's use of FreeBSD as the base of their console operating systems.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        I mean, it is definitely germane. Microsoft has always written their own software for their consoles, and Nintendo's history making console firmware is so complicated that they may as well just write it themselves. Building a mass-market console using off-the-shelf components and free software is a little more common now (See: Nintendo Switch running Android on an Nvidia Tegra), but Sony was really the first major console manufacturer to do it. The "notoriety" portion comes from the OtherOS side of things, as the other commenter mentioned. In the PS2 era, you could order a kit from Sony containing all of the software/hardware you needed to turn your PS2 into a reasonably capable Linux machine. To make a long story short, licensing is always a concern and it blew back in Sony's face. The whole "Linux on Playstation" thing is a blemish on Sony's reputation, and it's why a lot of people call Sony the "biggest offender" license abuse.
  - DanBC 5y ago

R0b0t1 5y ago

I tell people who want to make money off of FOSS to license as GPLv3 or AGPLv3. Offer a commercial license for money. Some people see megacorps' aversion to GPL and license as BSD, trying to believe that megacorp will come along and decide to hire them or pay them a retainer, despite the many instances of Amazon, Google, et al. ripping off some random permissively licensed project. There was previously a post on HN about this.

eecc 5y ago
So much this, well said. Only issue is with SASS strip-miners muscling you out of your commercial license space. On the one hand Amazon adoption certifies the success of your product, on the other it puts any ambition of financial return to rest.

turminal 5y ago

Giving up on something like that is quite narrow minded. Diversity matters and monoculture is almost never a good thing. The fact that there are open operating systems other than Linux makes Linux better too.

heathjohns 5y ago

While you're right in terms of technical prowess, there absolutely is a use case for BSD: it has a distinct culture with different values. There's a large group of people in technology who don't really care how something works, as long as it works for their purposes. That's set against another group who will put up with incovenience in the name of what they think is "correctness". I genuinely don't want to suggest that either group is better than the other - but they are distinct. Around 2010 I felt that the first group had started to dominate the decisions around the direction of the Linux userland. It was wonderful to be able to switch to BSD, which I sense is used and maintained mostly by the second group. Having an OS that is aligned with your culture is a sort of a "happiness by a thousand cuts": the defaults are already what you would have set them to, you don't have to declutter after the first install and what you do want is in the package repo, your niche use cases get attention when it comes to bug fixes because they're not considered niche in that crowd, etc. When the maintainers think the way you do it feels like they've anticipated your needs - it's presumably the same feeling that Apple-culture people feel when they use an Apple product; like it was made for them. In a lot of ways, technology has mostly become a matrix for competing cultures. From that perspective it's not a matter of what performance edge the BSDs have over Linux, it's about whether there's a distinct enough culture to justify the costs of the duplication of effort. In my mind that distinction has only grown in the last 10 years.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> BSD has no real use case except as a way to subsidize giant megacorp development with volunteer work. Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS. FreeBSD has ZFS in-tree as part of the base system with zero kludges (DKMS, I'm looking at you) and perfect compatibility supported directly by the core devs, as opposed to having to deal with a semi-hostile upstream (KH: "my tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existent", Torvalds: "If somebody adds a kernel module like ZFS, they are on their own. I can't maintain it, and I can not be bound by other people's kernel changes."), and it's the default filesystem out of the box for several releases now with good tooling support around it. ZFS can be hacked into a Linux distro, but it'll always be inferior.