7 ms·

Happy 30th FreeBSD: Why FreeBSD open source project has endured

166 points by vermaden 3y ago

derealized 3y ago
Article seems to be dead now (HN hug of death). I think one big reason is the BSD license. With fewer contributors, the ability for companies to create closed source products really helps to justify using it.
- kykeonaut 3y ago
  Yeah, it seems to be an ever increasing issue. I wonder what would be the minimum server specs to successfully fend off the hug of death.
dzogchen 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230731135739/https://aster.cloud/2023/06/16/happy-30th-freebsd-why-the-freebsd-open-source-project-has-endured/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230731135739/https://aster.clo...
alberth 3y ago
What I find interesting about FreeBSD is the lack of a BDFL, so this is a testament to the governance model & structure they have built. - OpenBSD (previously NetBSD) has Theo de Raadt - DragonflyBSD has Matt Dillon - Linux (kernel) has Linus Torvalds - GNU has Richard Stallman - FreeBSD doesn't have a "Founder/CEO" leading it, like the other examples above.
- tcmart14 3y ago
  NetBSD also lacks a BDFL I believe.
  - alberth 3y ago
    Yes, I believe that happened when Theo forked NetBSD to create OpenBSD. Similarly, while Matt Dillon wasn't a founder of FreeBSD, he certainly was a core/key leader within FreeBSD. When he forked FreeBSD to create DragonflyBSD, a sizable void was left within FreeBSD leadership team. (at least that's how I understand it)
- ilyt 3y ago
  Similarly Debian with their election system which seems to work fine
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Debian already had its own share of dramas as well.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  FreeBSD doesn't have a "Founder/CEO" leading it, like the other examples above. Now, sure. For a long while I'd say jkh came close to being a BDFL.
  - alberth 3y ago
    2001, jkh leaves FreeBSD (joins Apple) 2003, matt leaves FreeBSD (creates Dfly) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-July/006889.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-Jul...
    - inferiorhuman 3y ago
      jkh resigned in 2002, ostensibly not due to anything related to working for Apple. If memory serves there was plenty of drama around that time (and not just related to Matt). https://bsd.slashdot.org/story/02/04/30/012222/jordan-hubbard-resigns-from-freebsd-core https://bsd.slashdot.org/story/02/04/30/012222/jordan-hubbar...
- sph 3y ago
  In my opinion, the presence of a BDFL is what elevates open source to excellence from an aimless bazaar. Otherwise it's just a game of politics and bureaucracy to organise a herd of volunteers that would rather bike shed than reach a common goal. This is the reason why commercial software tends to be perceived of higher quality than most open source projects: you need someone to say "no, this is unacceptable." Thank God we have Linus. Meanwhile the Linux userspace is terrible because there is indeed no Linus, so we're still squabbling over X.org and systemd.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Except, like in any kingdom, the king that follows isn't necessarly as good, and so far most of the originaly BDFL are still around. I am the opinion this will all pass, and FOSS movement will fade once all key leaders are gone. Proven by the fizzling out of all relevant movements throughout the human history.
    - sph 3y ago
      Is the suffragette movement about to fizzle out? Movements fade away, unless they succeed in changing the status quo. Open source has stopped being a movement since the turn of the millennium.
e145bc455f1 3y ago
Are there any use cases where i should prefer FreeBSD over Linux?
- CodeCompost 3y ago
  Something something ZFS
  - derealized 3y ago
    I've met people running ZFS on Linux quite reliably this days, bar Oracle.
    - hnlmorg 3y ago
      ZFS is nicer on FreeBSD. Even on the more ZFS-friendly distros it still feels like an after thought. But in FreeBSD it’s as close to being a core part of the OS as it has been since the demise of Solaris and its various OpenSolaris forks. I say this as someone running ZFS on Linux too. So seen things from both sides of the fence. It’s hard to explain why it’s a nicer experience though. Maybe someone else can?
      - Brian_K_White 3y ago
        Then again something something inotify, which kqueue does not equal. I'm a bsd lover so don't take that wrong.
      - 1MachineElf 3y ago
        One example of the nicer experience, maybe as a by-product of the 1st class ZFS support, is that updating FreeBSD doesn't make me nervous like updating the Linux kernel does. On Linux, you're mostly limited to the kernel versions that have been explicitly tested against ZFS.
      - greggyb 3y ago
        ZFS memory stats are integrated into FreeBSD's top. Boot environments are trivial to configure; the OS upgrade tools integrate with BEs for you. It is considered a standard configuration (and has been so for years), so guides, docs, and software are written with explicit integrated support and expectations that you'll use it.
turnsout 3y ago
I've been running a FreeBSD server (web, email, DNS) for 20 years at this point, so consider this a long-term review. It just works! Specifically, keeping the system running and up-to-date is very low-maintenance. On the software side, the pkg system has been great—and a welcome change from manually installing ports from source. On the OS side, security updates and upgrading major and minor versions have all been painless. I haven't run a Linux server long-term, so I can't compare, but my biased perception from the outside is that it seems like Linux changes more rapidly and requires a bit more hands-on management.
- ilyt 3y ago
  That heavily depends on distro. Debian upgrades "just work". Even had colleague accidentally upgrade 2 releases at once (put too new repo on one of the old servers) and it worked without a hitch Ubuntu? eh, usually ? CentOS/RHEL/derivatives ? It isn't even supported as a feature. Both my desktop and NAS are going 10+ years with just dist-upgrade. Also few hundred servers at work where we migrated from CentOS (which was a chore to manage tbh).
  - kykeonaut 3y ago
    To be fair, Debian used to work even for FreeBSD back in the day with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
    - toast0 3y ago
      > To be fair, Debian used to work even for FreeBSD back in the day with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. As both a Debian and FreeBSD person, I think I was uniquely in a position to like this, and it was awful circa 2012. Some stuff would work, and a lot of stuff didn't, because FreeBSD basic utilities weren't packaged and GNU versions didn't have full functionality: network configuration was difficult, lots of administration was also difficult. You ended up needing a FreeBSD chroot, and then you might as well use FreeBSD/FreeBSD.
  - turnsout 3y ago
    That's interesting about Debian and dist-upgrade. I think I had assumed everyone had consolidated on Ubuntu, but every Ubuntu installation I've run has been a short-lived VPS, so I haven't had to think too much about long-term upgrades. But maybe that's the new mindset—just periodically wipe everything out and reinstall your application from a script/container/what-have-you.
TheIronMark 3y ago
Years ago, I wanted to learn Unix so I installed FreeBSD and ran mail and DNS on it. I thought, this will be a great learning experience. Except...it never broke. There was never anything to fix, so I didn't really learn that much from it outside of how to set things up (but just once). Then I installed linux and so many things broke all the time that I was learning everyday.
- kykeonaut 3y ago
  I would argue that you really did learn the Unix way with FreeBSD.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Yeah, this matches exactly my experience from two decades ago. I have also learned much more by fixing Linux, while my FreeBSD servers ran unattended for months or years.
  - self_awareness 3y ago
    You guys never update your servers?
    - ectospheno 3y ago
      I am infinitely more likely to setup unattended updates on a BSD box.
- krylon 3y ago
  That, in a nutshell, is what I - and no doubt many others - appreciate deeply about FreeBSD. Getting it to do what you want may not be trivial, but once you got it working, it stays that way. (The same can be said about OpenBSD and NetBSD, too, with the caveat that the OpenBSD developers do not put such a premium on backward compatibility.) Relative to Windows, this is what I like about GNU/Linux, too. I used to work as an admin/helpdesk monkey, taking care of ~75 users and about 10 servers. And things would randomly break all the time. Having used mostly Linux and BSD in my private life for more than a decade at the time, I constantly found myself wondering how people can live like this. FWIW, on Debian and openSUSE, I had no trouble with things breaking randomly except on Tumbleweed. But there, it's usually just a question of rolling back to the latest snapshot, waiting for a week or so and running the upgrade again.
rickstanley 3y ago
I've been trying to move to FreeBSD for quite some time, but I play games on Linux heavily, the last time I tried playing on FreeBSD I had some driver issues with Nvidia; of course, Nvidia not being the best when it comes to open source. How is the gaming experience in FreeBSD these days? Has anyone tried it? Funny, a long time ago I was in the hurdle of switching between Windows and Linux to play games, now with Proton, it is "FreeBSD vs Linux".
- gigatexal 3y ago
  Same here. I’ll forever be on Fedora 38 until gaming via proton etc is as easy as it is on Linux.
- asveikau 3y ago
  I would not say I've been gaming with it, but proprietary nvidia drivers have not given me problems on freebsd.
- jjahdhnmko 3y ago
  I don't really know, but I suspect it still isn't very good for that use case. There simply isn't much overlap between those communities. Desktop environments on FreeBSD would still be somewhat unusual in my view and I would tell somebody trying to get that setup to just use Linux if it's a big deal for them.
gigatexal 3y ago
How much if any does Netflix and Sony give to the FreeBSD foundation either in fiat currency donations and/or engineering time donated? Netflix uses it at their core for the CDN stuff. I think the core of PlayStation OS is FreeBSD. So I’m curious how much these companies are supporting the foundation at.
- rjsw 3y ago
  You can see large donations listed by year here [1]. [1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/
  - siffland 3y ago
    It is also not just about the financial donations. These companies also do contribute back some source code. I know they do not contribute all of it back, however for closed source products to give back is a nice touch.
- mikece 3y ago
  Both do, as does a large firewall maker (Juniper, I think). They keep certain aspects of the secret sauce back but upstreaming changes is enlightened self-interest as they don't have to apply a long series of in-house changes when an upgrade to FreeBSD comes out (Bryan Lunduke had an interview with a FreeBSD maintainer where this was discussed -- I'm not finding that on YouTube though).
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    Lunduke pulled his videos from YouTube a while ago. I think he moved to Odysee or another platform.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fefe23 3y ago
This would feel much more genuine if there wasn't a thick layer of advertising around it. Look at us, we sell services. Here is a list of our partners.
siffland 3y ago
I have been using FreeBSD since 1999, it was version 3.somthing, cannot remember. Since then my main server/development box has always been FreeBSD (I have a Linux one as well for some software that just will not run). Somewhere along that path i became a Linux admin (and HPUX but that was long ago), starting with RHEL3 (I was using gentoo at home). I have a bunch of servers, FreeBSD, Linux and yes windows. They each have their place. FreeBSD for me is simple. I have 2 Raspberry Pi 3's with 512MB of ram running FreeBSD 13 and Unbound and a Pi 4 Running FreeBSD and Asterisk. I forget they exist. They literally just keep running, I update them and if needed reboot and they just keep going. You can use mtree to verify the OS, Security is good. But some things like DNS, i do not play with, just let it run (and keep it patched). I have a full blown Ubuntu Kubernetes cluster and a few RHEL and OEL vm's running various tasks in the lab. Most are the right tool for the job i need it to do. I have never understood the flame wars for my distro (Linux vs BSD) is better than yours and my license is better (or allows more freedom) than your. They each really do have their places with some expected overlap. I am just happy with the variety that allows me a ton of choices and usually drives innovation.
TyroneBlack 3y ago
I'm wondering if anybody has an explanation for the relatively few BSD distros as compared to Linux? Is it just due to the smaller community and limited resources or is there something different with BSD that leads to less division?
- drewg123 3y ago
  I think a lot of it is because unlike Linux, FreeBSD is a not just a kernel, but an entire OS, with a kernel, utilities, compilers, and a package manager. There have been different distros (PC-BSD, debian kfreebsd, etc), but I think the "default" upstream distro has most of what's needed. And there are likely "distros" that you don't see. Eg, we run our own private "distro" on the CDN at Netflix, which is basically upstream FreeBSD + some kernel patches queued for upstreaming + a limited number of ports + some netflix specific stuff. I imagine other companies using FreeBSD (NetApp, Sony, etc) also have their own private distros.
  - TyroneBlack 3y ago
    I guess my question was more about something like Debian which would be more comparable to FreeBSD. Ubuntu is based on Debian. PopOS and Mint are built off of Ubuntu. They are all separate, but still pull the code from their upstream. Why isn't there a situation like that with the BSDs? As far as I know the only ones that exist like that are GhostBSD and HardenedBSD. Why do the BSDs split for good instead of just pulling from upstream and making some changes? There are also private linux distros. I wasn't really getting into them since they aren't available.
    - toast0 3y ago
      OpenBSD split from NetBSD about philosophy, and the changes go deep. I never used PC-BSD, but I gather it is (or was?) mostly a few changes on top of FreeBSD, so it would fit your model. FreeNAS/TrueNAS core is more or less a specialized distribution of FreeBSD. Otoh, DragonflyBSD is a fork of FreeBSD; there were big differences in opinion on how SMP should be implemented, and then big differences in implementation, making it hard to just pull and make changes.

166 points by vermaden 3y ago

Article seems to be dead now (HN hug of death). I think one big reason is the BSD license. With fewer contributors, the ability for companies to create closed source products really helps to justify using it.

kykeonaut 3y ago
Yeah, it seems to be an ever increasing issue. I wonder what would be the minimum server specs to successfully fend off the hug of death.

dzogchen 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230731135739/https://aster.cloud/2023/06/16/happy-30th-freebsd-why-the-freebsd-open-source-project-has-endured/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230731135739/https://aster.clo...

alberth 3y ago

What I find interesting about FreeBSD is the lack of a BDFL, so this is a testament to the governance model & structure they have built. - OpenBSD (previously NetBSD) has Theo de Raadt - DragonflyBSD has Matt Dillon - Linux (kernel) has Linus Torvalds - GNU has Richard Stallman - FreeBSD doesn't have a "Founder/CEO" leading it, like the other examples above.

tcmart14 3y ago
NetBSD also lacks a BDFL I believe.
- alberth 3y ago
  Yes, I believe that happened when Theo forked NetBSD to create OpenBSD. Similarly, while Matt Dillon wasn't a founder of FreeBSD, he certainly was a core/key leader within FreeBSD. When he forked FreeBSD to create DragonflyBSD, a sizable void was left within FreeBSD leadership team. (at least that's how I understand it)
ilyt 3y ago
Similarly Debian with their election system which seems to work fine
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Debian already had its own share of dramas as well.
inferiorhuman 3y ago
FreeBSD doesn't have a "Founder/CEO" leading it, like the other examples above. Now, sure. For a long while I'd say jkh came close to being a BDFL.
- alberth 3y ago
  2001, jkh leaves FreeBSD (joins Apple) 2003, matt leaves FreeBSD (creates Dfly) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-July/006889.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-Jul...
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    jkh resigned in 2002, ostensibly not due to anything related to working for Apple. If memory serves there was plenty of drama around that time (and not just related to Matt). https://bsd.slashdot.org/story/02/04/30/012222/jordan-hubbard-resigns-from-freebsd-core https://bsd.slashdot.org/story/02/04/30/012222/jordan-hubbar...
sph 3y ago
In my opinion, the presence of a BDFL is what elevates open source to excellence from an aimless bazaar. Otherwise it's just a game of politics and bureaucracy to organise a herd of volunteers that would rather bike shed than reach a common goal. This is the reason why commercial software tends to be perceived of higher quality than most open source projects: you need someone to say "no, this is unacceptable." Thank God we have Linus. Meanwhile the Linux userspace is terrible because there is indeed no Linus, so we're still squabbling over X.org and systemd.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Except, like in any kingdom, the king that follows isn't necessarly as good, and so far most of the originaly BDFL are still around. I am the opinion this will all pass, and FOSS movement will fade once all key leaders are gone. Proven by the fizzling out of all relevant movements throughout the human history.
  - sph 3y ago
    Is the suffragette movement about to fizzle out? Movements fade away, unless they succeed in changing the status quo. Open source has stopped being a movement since the turn of the millennium.

e145bc455f1 3y ago

Are there any use cases where i should prefer FreeBSD over Linux?

CodeCompost 3y ago
Something something ZFS
- derealized 3y ago
  I've met people running ZFS on Linux quite reliably this days, bar Oracle.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    ZFS is nicer on FreeBSD. Even on the more ZFS-friendly distros it still feels like an after thought. But in FreeBSD it’s as close to being a core part of the OS as it has been since the demise of Solaris and its various OpenSolaris forks. I say this as someone running ZFS on Linux too. So seen things from both sides of the fence. It’s hard to explain why it’s a nicer experience though. Maybe someone else can?
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      Then again something something inotify, which kqueue does not equal. I'm a bsd lover so don't take that wrong.
    - 1MachineElf 3y ago
      One example of the nicer experience, maybe as a by-product of the 1st class ZFS support, is that updating FreeBSD doesn't make me nervous like updating the Linux kernel does. On Linux, you're mostly limited to the kernel versions that have been explicitly tested against ZFS.
    - greggyb 3y ago
      ZFS memory stats are integrated into FreeBSD's top. Boot environments are trivial to configure; the OS upgrade tools integrate with BEs for you. It is considered a standard configuration (and has been so for years), so guides, docs, and software are written with explicit integrated support and expectations that you'll use it.

turnsout 3y ago

I've been running a FreeBSD server (web, email, DNS) for 20 years at this point, so consider this a long-term review. It just works! Specifically, keeping the system running and up-to-date is very low-maintenance. On the software side, the pkg system has been great—and a welcome change from manually installing ports from source. On the OS side, security updates and upgrading major and minor versions have all been painless. I haven't run a Linux server long-term, so I can't compare, but my biased perception from the outside is that it seems like Linux changes more rapidly and requires a bit more hands-on management.

ilyt 3y ago
That heavily depends on distro. Debian upgrades "just work". Even had colleague accidentally upgrade 2 releases at once (put too new repo on one of the old servers) and it worked without a hitch Ubuntu? eh, usually ? CentOS/RHEL/derivatives ? It isn't even supported as a feature. Both my desktop and NAS are going 10+ years with just dist-upgrade. Also few hundred servers at work where we migrated from CentOS (which was a chore to manage tbh).
- kykeonaut 3y ago
  To be fair, Debian used to work even for FreeBSD back in the day with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
  - toast0 3y ago
    > To be fair, Debian used to work even for FreeBSD back in the day with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. As both a Debian and FreeBSD person, I think I was uniquely in a position to like this, and it was awful circa 2012. Some stuff would work, and a lot of stuff didn't, because FreeBSD basic utilities weren't packaged and GNU versions didn't have full functionality: network configuration was difficult, lots of administration was also difficult. You ended up needing a FreeBSD chroot, and then you might as well use FreeBSD/FreeBSD.
- turnsout 3y ago
  That's interesting about Debian and dist-upgrade. I think I had assumed everyone had consolidated on Ubuntu, but every Ubuntu installation I've run has been a short-lived VPS, so I haven't had to think too much about long-term upgrades. But maybe that's the new mindset—just periodically wipe everything out and reinstall your application from a script/container/what-have-you.

TheIronMark 3y ago

Years ago, I wanted to learn Unix so I installed FreeBSD and ran mail and DNS on it. I thought, this will be a great learning experience. Except...it never broke. There was never anything to fix, so I didn't really learn that much from it outside of how to set things up (but just once). Then I installed linux and so many things broke all the time that I was learning everyday.

kykeonaut 3y ago
I would argue that you really did learn the Unix way with FreeBSD.
adrian_b 3y ago
Yeah, this matches exactly my experience from two decades ago. I have also learned much more by fixing Linux, while my FreeBSD servers ran unattended for months or years.
- self_awareness 3y ago
  You guys never update your servers?
  - ectospheno 3y ago
    I am infinitely more likely to setup unattended updates on a BSD box.
krylon 3y ago
That, in a nutshell, is what I - and no doubt many others - appreciate deeply about FreeBSD. Getting it to do what you want may not be trivial, but once you got it working, it stays that way. (The same can be said about OpenBSD and NetBSD, too, with the caveat that the OpenBSD developers do not put such a premium on backward compatibility.) Relative to Windows, this is what I like about GNU/Linux, too. I used to work as an admin/helpdesk monkey, taking care of ~75 users and about 10 servers. And things would randomly break all the time. Having used mostly Linux and BSD in my private life for more than a decade at the time, I constantly found myself wondering how people can live like this. FWIW, on Debian and openSUSE, I had no trouble with things breaking randomly except on Tumbleweed. But there, it's usually just a question of rolling back to the latest snapshot, waiting for a week or so and running the upgrade again.

rickstanley 3y ago

I've been trying to move to FreeBSD for quite some time, but I play games on Linux heavily, the last time I tried playing on FreeBSD I had some driver issues with Nvidia; of course, Nvidia not being the best when it comes to open source. How is the gaming experience in FreeBSD these days? Has anyone tried it? Funny, a long time ago I was in the hurdle of switching between Windows and Linux to play games, now with Proton, it is "FreeBSD vs Linux".

gigatexal 3y ago
Same here. I’ll forever be on Fedora 38 until gaming via proton etc is as easy as it is on Linux.
asveikau 3y ago
I would not say I've been gaming with it, but proprietary nvidia drivers have not given me problems on freebsd.
jjahdhnmko 3y ago
I don't really know, but I suspect it still isn't very good for that use case. There simply isn't much overlap between those communities. Desktop environments on FreeBSD would still be somewhat unusual in my view and I would tell somebody trying to get that setup to just use Linux if it's a big deal for them.

gigatexal 3y ago

How much if any does Netflix and Sony give to the FreeBSD foundation either in fiat currency donations and/or engineering time donated? Netflix uses it at their core for the CDN stuff. I think the core of PlayStation OS is FreeBSD. So I’m curious how much these companies are supporting the foundation at.

rjsw 3y ago
You can see large donations listed by year here [1]. [1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/
- siffland 3y ago
  It is also not just about the financial donations. These companies also do contribute back some source code. I know they do not contribute all of it back, however for closed source products to give back is a nice touch.
mikece 3y ago
Both do, as does a large firewall maker (Juniper, I think). They keep certain aspects of the secret sauce back but upstreaming changes is enlightened self-interest as they don't have to apply a long series of in-house changes when an upgrade to FreeBSD comes out (Bryan Lunduke had an interview with a FreeBSD maintainer where this was discussed -- I'm not finding that on YouTube though).
- Tijdreiziger 3y ago
  Lunduke pulled his videos from YouTube a while ago. I think he moved to Odysee or another platform.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

fefe23 3y ago

This would feel much more genuine if there wasn't a thick layer of advertising around it. Look at us, we sell services. Here is a list of our partners.

siffland 3y ago

I have been using FreeBSD since 1999, it was version 3.somthing, cannot remember. Since then my main server/development box has always been FreeBSD (I have a Linux one as well for some software that just will not run). Somewhere along that path i became a Linux admin (and HPUX but that was long ago), starting with RHEL3 (I was using gentoo at home). I have a bunch of servers, FreeBSD, Linux and yes windows. They each have their place. FreeBSD for me is simple. I have 2 Raspberry Pi 3's with 512MB of ram running FreeBSD 13 and Unbound and a Pi 4 Running FreeBSD and Asterisk. I forget they exist. They literally just keep running, I update them and if needed reboot and they just keep going. You can use mtree to verify the OS, Security is good. But some things like DNS, i do not play with, just let it run (and keep it patched). I have a full blown Ubuntu Kubernetes cluster and a few RHEL and OEL vm's running various tasks in the lab. Most are the right tool for the job i need it to do. I have never understood the flame wars for my distro (Linux vs BSD) is better than yours and my license is better (or allows more freedom) than your. They each really do have their places with some expected overlap. I am just happy with the variety that allows me a ton of choices and usually drives innovation.

TyroneBlack 3y ago

I'm wondering if anybody has an explanation for the relatively few BSD distros as compared to Linux? Is it just due to the smaller community and limited resources or is there something different with BSD that leads to less division?

drewg123 3y ago
I think a lot of it is because unlike Linux, FreeBSD is a not just a kernel, but an entire OS, with a kernel, utilities, compilers, and a package manager. There have been different distros (PC-BSD, debian kfreebsd, etc), but I think the "default" upstream distro has most of what's needed. And there are likely "distros" that you don't see. Eg, we run our own private "distro" on the CDN at Netflix, which is basically upstream FreeBSD + some kernel patches queued for upstreaming + a limited number of ports + some netflix specific stuff. I imagine other companies using FreeBSD (NetApp, Sony, etc) also have their own private distros.
- TyroneBlack 3y ago
  I guess my question was more about something like Debian which would be more comparable to FreeBSD. Ubuntu is based on Debian. PopOS and Mint are built off of Ubuntu. They are all separate, but still pull the code from their upstream. Why isn't there a situation like that with the BSDs? As far as I know the only ones that exist like that are GhostBSD and HardenedBSD. Why do the BSDs split for good instead of just pulling from upstream and making some changes? There are also private linux distros. I wasn't really getting into them since they aren't available.
  - toast0 3y ago
    OpenBSD split from NetBSD about philosophy, and the changes go deep. I never used PC-BSD, but I gather it is (or was?) mostly a few changes on top of FreeBSD, so it would fit your model. FreeNAS/TrueNAS core is more or less a specialized distribution of FreeBSD. Otoh, DragonflyBSD is a fork of FreeBSD; there were big differences in opinion on how SMP should be implemented, and then big differences in implementation, making it hard to just pull and make changes.