We’re pleased to announce that June 19 has been declared FreeBSD Day. Join us in honoring The FreeBSD Project’s pioneering legacy and continuing impact on technology.
Why today? Well, 25 years ago to the day, the name FreeBSD was chosen as the name for the project. FreeBSD formed the base of all kinds of operating systems we use every day today – like macOS and iOS and the operating systems on the Nintendo Switch and Playstation 3, 4, and Vita – and FreeBSD code can be found in the unlikeliest of places, such as Haiku, which uses FreeBSD network drivers, and even Windows, which, although information is sparse, seemed to at one point use FreeBSD code for command-line networking utilities like ftp, nslookup, rcp, and rsh.
I have found it quite odd for some time that more companies did not jump on the BSD bandwagon since it does not come with the commercially restrictive GPL license.
It is a shame for FreeBSD as this has meant that projects and drivers have always taken a back seat to Linux and mostly feel broken in usage ( aka desktop utilities often misbehave under BSD ) and is far less smooth in usability then Linux… Yet the OS itself has been amazing and has introduced technologies that other OS’s have run with.
At this point, I think the biggest blocker to adoption is the lack of mainstream virtualization technologies supporting FreeBSD. While there are packages for docker and so on , it’s not upstreamed. If people could run FreeBSD as docker images, I think we’d see a surge.
For desktop use, I think there’s a little hope but not much. In a few years, it will have to be on ARM hardware.
That said, I’ve pushed FreeBSD at a number of jobs and seen some really positive results. At two different positions, I ran FreeBSD on my desktop too.
I only wish I had made more of a dent with MidnightBSD when I had more developers. PC-BSD/TrueOS keeps transitioning to different DEs and relaunching so much I think it’s confused some people. Unless we get a lot of BSD developers involved in Wayland / X.org, Gnome, KDE and other projects, we’re not going to see any BSD project get a footing in desktops.
Well there was the ATT lawsuit(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berk….) , that kind of stunted its growth just as Linux showed up. Threading was also terrible until FreeBSD 5 or so. I think the changes that were contributed by IBM back to linux were invaluable in it taking over the server market.
Care to elaborate how the GPL is “commercially restrictive?”
Well, the requirement that source code is distributed makes it unsuitable in some commercial applications.
That is a restriction that FreeBSD doesn’t have.
On the surface that makes sense but then why is it dying along with proprietary UNIXs?
What makes you think it’s dying?
Being supported as a first-class option on Microsoft’s Azure platform seems to indicate life. It’s supported on Amazon’s AWS, too.
As does being the basis of the OS’s on the Playstation 3, 4, and Vita, plus the Nintendo Switch as well
It’s also the basis for Juniper’s Junos OS router software, and is also the basis of iXsystems NAS offerings.
It powers much of Netflix’s backend, and is expanding support of non-x86 platforms (especially ARM and Power)
I’d say those are all plenty of signs that it’s well alive.
You only have to redistribute, if asked, the source code you took and the modifications you did to it.
There is a tremendous amount of GPL code used in commercial systems.
They did, and exactly thanks to the BSD license they kept everything for themselves.
So? That doesn’t diminish the value of FreeBSD.
For the record, Microsoft, Sony, and many others that use FreeBSD in proprietary products contribute back.
So how much PS4 code did Sony contribute back, or Nintendo for that matter regarding the Switch?
Edited 2018-06-20 07:21 UTC
Sony contributed AVX support.
AFAIK Nintendo hasn’t given back, but, whatever. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Other than how much Linux gets back vs BSDs.
And how much has Linux gotten back from Sony or Nintendo?
For Sony a few things,
https://developer.sony.com/
http://ps2linux.no-ip.info/playstation2-linux.com/index.html
https://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/
Nintendo with their iron hand would never touch anything that could endanger it.
My Panasonic TV runs FreeBSD, apparently 🙂
Its “smart” apps are a bit rubbish but it is FreeBSD underneath.
I think I only realised when I looked at the filesystem of the drive for recording.
The routers running JunOS are using a stripped-down, customised version of FreeBSD, and they give Cisco gear a run for their money. There’s also firewall appliances running JunOS using IPFilter for packet filtering.
While the vast majority of Netflix infrastructure is run in the Amazon cloud, their OpenConnect CDN network (and OpenConnect boxes in particular) run FreeBSD.
Both of these companies commit changes back into FreeBSD on a fairly regular basis, especially on the networking side of things.
Yes, but it seems the project is always starving for resources.
Kind of surprised by its current sponsor list:
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donors/
Microsoft?!? Okay. Sure why not. You give me nice things like WSL and apparently FreeBSD and I’ll give you a break and not make the obvious joke here.
MS has donated/written a lot of guest driver code to allow FreeBSD to run as a proper Hyper-V guest (without resorting to using emulated NICs and storage).
Yeah. Its changing now, but for a while it seemed like all of ms contributions to open source were only to allow things to run better on Hyper V.
The services part of Microsoft is pretty agnostic,