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FreeBSD, Stealthy Open Source Project
zam4ever writes "Sean Michael Kerner has written an article on how FreeBSD has become a Stealth-Growth Open Source Project with various reasons outlined for FreeBSD's growth over the last years."
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Quandt also contends that FreeBSD is not currently on the same level as Linux when it comes to supporting heavy enterprise workloads...
:)
I was almost certain this paragraph was going to end praising FreeBSD over Linux, and I was slightly suprised to see this was not the case. FreeBSD's ability to cope with extremely high workloads is often cited as one of the reasons to use it over Linux in such environments.
However, I don't remember ever seeing any evidence of this, except that FreeBSD has proven itself time and time again on some of the largest, busiest internet sites. It'd be interesting to see how the two compared side-by-side in a real production environment. Perhaps someone can convince Yahoo to switch to Linux for a day
</ BSD advocacy >
I know for damn sure I'm one of those who's gonna seriously love having a 5-STABLE branch. :)
Damn tho, they need to stop talking to Linux people for these articles. I'm sick of hearing the GPL partyline.
FreeBSD is used on over 95 of the top 100 servers (greatest average uptime). FreeBSD is tested and true on the server-side in a way few linux distrobutions can claim. The closest any distro has come to actually matching reliability with FreeBSD is Debian. But even then, FreeBSD is still light-years ahead. I'm not really sure what inspired this article, but a simple google search reveals that BSD is the route most major corporations are taking with servers. So while I do appreciate GNU/GPL support, try to be less blatant. ;)
Though he acknowledged that a FreeBSD license can be simple to deal with, he thinks the GPL (define) license, under which the Linux kernel is licensed, fosters a better sense of community.
Right.
Would be funny if some slashdot admin could do a grep for adti.net in their server logs and post the results...
Eh, let the Linux fanboys talk all they want, as long as my mailserver keeps chugging away. ;)
over one million new domains were hosted on FreeBSD over the last year
Since OS X (Darwin) is based on FreeBSD, does this mean that the Netcraft figures counted OS X Server hosts as FreeBSD?
Well BSD is in a lot of strange places. Recently the company I work for aquired an eCabinet - which runs FreeBSD. The sales guy will usually say that it runs Unix, the tech guys who set up the thing say the thing runs Linux, but no one seems to actually KNOW that it runs FreeBSD. The same thing happens at my company where people think many of our servers are Linux or Unix (etc) but don't seem to know what BSD is. That's fine, it takes too much effort to explain the difference, and doesn't really matter what they know. I admin the servers, they get the reliable service and that's all that matters.
I think half the time FreeBSD admins don't say anything because they don't want to go on and on explaining what FreeBSD is. It's bad enough explaining what Linux is even though Linux has gained a lot of recognition.
Did anyone else pick up from the article that BSD was gaining vs Linux because it did not have the GPL legal baggage?
Isn't it actually funny that the ports system is a pure userland framework that has nothing inherently FreeBSD-ish? It could just as well be adopted by Linux distros, but right now, only gentoo did it.
One of the best features of FreeBSD is in my experience the ease with which you can update the whole system with a simple cvsup and recompile. No need to go hunting for N utilities and libraries all over the Net, just to get the sources to a base system. It's in the CVS repo, ready to be grabbed.
The CVS repository is also a great resource if you are interested in the development history of the system. Not only the kernel, but the whole system. If Linux (as an OS, not only a kernel) had a unified CVS just like the BSDs right from the start, it would have been much easier to debunk TSG/SCO's myths and FUD.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I was a big RedHat/Linux user until about 5 or so years ago. I got sick of:
* The constantly changing startup environment and filesystem layout. I started typing "evolving", but that implies it was small changes for the better, not wholesale changes which weren't always for the worse.
* Kernel upgrades became a big nuisance, requiring me to track down a whole bunch of userland applications that needed updating for the kernel. to be usable (psutils, for one). Why the kernel and key kernel applications aren't packaged together is beyond me.
* The installer became more and more piggish, adding X11 elements even when I specifically told it not to. The portions were hard to remove, since they almost always were snared in RPM dependencies.
* RPM itself wasn't bad, but what DID drive me nuts about binary packages was the total absence of build documentation. So many UNIX applications have significant build-time options which are never documented in RPM. SRPM helped, but it was still an annoyance.
FreeBSD just seems how it *should* be. The filesystem and startup environment isn't static, but doesn't make wholesale changes. The entire system is rebuildable from source, applications are transparently and easily buildable from source thanks to ports.
FreeBSD's installer could be improved, though. sysinstall needs to be reinvented and perhaps have picobsd merged into it. I'd love to be able to install a variable-sized FreeBSD for firewall or appliance-type installs.
Those are the current *binary packages*. In other words, this is what IS directly supported by Sun, allowing for an easy binary install. Whereas, if you want 1.4.2, you can get that, but you have to follow a few more steps, as mentioned by "APurplePolarBear" above. (and you have to wait through an interminable compile time -- fortunately, FreeBSD compiles like a champ, still handling its other processes, even for the most demanding portions of a compile)
Consider this: computers are getting more and more popular; they are being integrated into more aspects of our lives than they ever were before, and now it's standard for people to own them. Another interesting combination is that personal computers have gotten cheaper and more powerful at the same time.
Of course, none of this is a new development; people could have and were saying these sorts of things over a decade ago, but the good thing is that it's still true.
What's newer is the fact that open source seems to have escalated since then; every day it keeps becoming a bigger and bigger deal. More large companies are working with it than ever before, development has increased, and code maturity levels are always rising. A linux system installed today is something really different than what I started out using only three years ago.
Okay, so what does this all mean, and what does it have to do with BSD? Well, nobody will deny that linux is the big thing, and, while linux gets most of the press, BSD has always been around, and BSD is always being further developed and improved upon at a rate not at all unlike linux. What's good for one open source software product is good for another, and it seems that BSD is chugging right along with the rest of them.
I don't have data like Netcraft does, and it's a mistake to make hard conclusions based on pseronal experience, but I've spent a bit of time on the #freebsd channel on freenode, and from that alone I see FreeBSD adoption/development taking place. Any time I go in there (the channel is a little crowded), there is always somebody there who has questions about FreeBSD; some of them are curious about it, some are trying to install it for the first time, some are new to their systems and need help getting started with a particular task, and some are a little bit more experienced but are still pressing forward with something new. These people are always there. Talking to some of them, you'd find that most were people who had been using linux and started using FreeBSD after hearing good things about it or simply developing an interest in something new.
When people aren't talking about learning FreeBSD, they are talking about projected development, new features, etc. And this is all very apt because new developments in this modern operating system have proliferated (just look at all the changes in the FreeBSD new technology release).
I can imagine how people might consider BSD to be something traditionally "old-fashioned", but to me it's about as shiny and new as linux, and I regard both systems with equal fervor.
I never said FreeBSD was as secure as OpenBSD, what I said is that it is far more secure than Linux, which is true, and strongly supported by the facts.
Oh good, sounds like you've researched it well then. Please share.
And no, I don't want a link or two to a couple of vulnerabilities, and a story about how you've "had this FreeBSD server that saved the day crap crap blah blah".
I expect you have some comprehensive and unbiased statistics backed up with sources. Thanks.