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While I can't hope to do justice to this question, FreeBSD is a fully functional unix system, with a kernel and userland wholly its own (licensed with the BSD l

While I can't hope to do justice to this question, FreeBSD is a fully functional unix system, with a kernel and userland wholly its own (licensed with the BSD license) as well as a well maintained ports tree that brings in most of the unix application universe (x windows, windows managers, databases, programming environments, etc) and can be used anywhere a unix system is desired. That said, it is very popular in networking applications (Junos the OS for Juniper network switches is based on FreeBSD) and other embedded situations (Mac OS X has a forked version of FreeBSD as its unix layer. Most people won't characterize OS X as having FreeBSD lineage any more, but at its root, there were some parts that were brought over in the early days.) Sony PS3/4 also has some parts based on FreeBSD. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeBSD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeB... for a partial list of interesting applications based on FreeBSD. It is especially appealing as a non-linux opensource project with a BSD (non GPL) license that is fairly well maintained. The Non-GPL license means that a company can use FreeBSD in a closed-source project. Usually the FreeBSD core maintainers care more about correctness and principles more than pure performance, so in a straight performance shootout linux would probably still win, but FreeBSD is close enough that it doesn't matter for the types of applications it's usually used in. There is probably a ton more specific things that people will call me out on, but http://www.freebsd.org/advocacy/ http://www.freebsd.org/advocacy/ (the advocacy working group) would be a good place to start digging if you are interested.

AlexMax 13y ago
> It is especially appealing as a non-linux opensource project with a BSD (non GPL) license that is fairly well maintained. The Non-GPL license means that a company can use FreeBSD in a closed-source project. How much of a one way street does this turn out to be for FreeBSD? I've always worried about BSD projects being left hung out to dry because companies have less of an obligation to contribute to the parent project compared to something like Linux, but I'd be interested to see how it works out in practice. I do remember reading some depressing things about contributions to OpenSSH (a quick google search returns "OpenSSH has no wealthy sponsors, nor a business model. In fact, no Commercial Unix or Linux vendor has ever given our project a cent."), but perhaps FreeBSD is different in that aspect.
- profquail 13y ago
  The FreeBSD Foundation does get some monetary support from both commercial users and end-users; some commercial FreeBSD users (e.g., Netflix, Juniper) have core developers on their payroll, so they indirectly contribute in that way instead. FreeBSD also benefits when companies release or contribute to other BSD-licensed, open-source projects, since that code can then be used within FreeBSD itself. Apple's (and Intel's) contributions to Clang/LLVM are a prime example; another is Apple's open-sourcing of launchd, the FreeBSD port of which was just relaunched (no pun intended): https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd But yes, as some GPL proponents will point out, there are companies who use FreeBSD for their commercial products without contributing back. In the end, they probably lose out as much as anyone though, due to the cost of paying developers to maintain a completely separate codebase.

AlexMax 13y ago

> It is especially appealing as a non-linux opensource project with a BSD (non GPL) license that is fairly well maintained. The Non-GPL license means that a company can use FreeBSD in a closed-source project. How much of a one way street does this turn out to be for FreeBSD? I've always worried about BSD projects being left hung out to dry because companies have less of an obligation to contribute to the parent project compared to something like Linux, but I'd be interested to see how it works out in practice. I do remember reading some depressing things about contributions to OpenSSH (a quick google search returns "OpenSSH has no wealthy sponsors, nor a business model. In fact, no Commercial Unix or Linux vendor has ever given our project a cent."), but perhaps FreeBSD is different in that aspect.

profquail 13y ago
The FreeBSD Foundation does get some monetary support from both commercial users and end-users; some commercial FreeBSD users (e.g., Netflix, Juniper) have core developers on their payroll, so they indirectly contribute in that way instead. FreeBSD also benefits when companies release or contribute to other BSD-licensed, open-source projects, since that code can then be used within FreeBSD itself. Apple's (and Intel's) contributions to Clang/LLVM are a prime example; another is Apple's open-sourcing of launchd, the FreeBSD port of which was just relaunched (no pun intended): https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd But yes, as some GPL proponents will point out, there are companies who use FreeBSD for their commercial products without contributing back. In the end, they probably lose out as much as anyone though, due to the cost of paying developers to maintain a completely separate codebase.