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Happy 20th Birthday, FreeBSD

Posted by timothy on from the long-may-it-wave dept.

mbadolato writes "FreeBSD celebrates its 20th birthday this week. On 19 June 1993, David Greenman, Jordan Hubbard and Rod Grimes announced the creation of their new fork of the BSD 4.3 operating system, and its new name: FreeBSD." And in the time since then, FreeBSD hasn't exactly stood still; it's spawned numerous other projects (like DragonFly BSD and PC-BSD), as well as served as the basis for much of Mac OS X; there's even a Raspberry Pi build.

2 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Congrats FreeBSD by Arker · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is a little bit of truth hiding behind your words but your statement is still very misleading.

    GPL is much more 'truly open' precisely because no 'proprietary' implementation of a standard with a GPL reference implementation will be able to simply lift the code (legally.) *Proprietary* being the keyword here - you said commercial, and that is simply false. You can make a commercial implementation of a standard with a GPL reference implementation, and furthermore you can simply copy that reference implementation to do it!

    Proprietary != commercial. Slackware, RedHat, Ubuntu, etc. are all commercial. GPL is perfectly fine with commercial. It's only proprietary that it objects to (and for good reason!)

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    Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
  2. Re:It just works by steg0 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I recall frequent kernel panics while booting that were related to the Intel Ethernet chipset on a SuperMicro H8SGL-F board (not exactly the least common hardware) in a released version (I think it was 8.2 or 8.3), which was probably this. Rather annoying.

    There have been other problems, too (off the top of my head), like

    • the mediocre PAE support,
    • and the in my eyes rather ungracefully handled transition to Xorg 7.2 in the 6.x releases, which for me didn't work at all like the documentation said, although this was not a problem of the base system, but the ports collection.
    • Then there's stuff like some guys arbitrarily deciding to reimplement the system installer and on top of that, to remove the old one in the time window between 9.0 RC 3 and 9.0-RELEASE, see (along with some elitist Linux bashing going on:) here and here
    • or the transition to Clang at a time when it wasn't even ready for the non-x86 architectures!

    So sometimes I ask myself whether this OS is really ready for prime time

    But enough of the rant. I've been sticking to it since 2000 and for most of the time it just runs and does its job. It's got some nice coherent documentation too.