Happy 20th Birthday, FreeBSD

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.

Comments

It just works

[approachingZero]

I've been using it since about 1998 to serve web pages. Solid product, thanks for all the hard work people.

Re:It just works

[mlts]

It works without issue. I've used a BSD on and off since the days of Jolitz's 386BSD which came with a compressed image with a number of utilities on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Before this, if a person wanted source code to look at, they would have to pay a good mint to BSDI or a company like that... and of course, if you wanted SVR4 source... good luck with that.

Ahh... memories.

Congrats FreeBSD

[laffer1]

FreeBSD is a great example of open source working. Not only has it been successful, but it has spawned a lot of other open source projects such as GhostBSD, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, DragonFly, pfsense, freenas, nanobsd, and my own MidnightBSD.

There are a lot of people who have donated a lot of time to FreeBSD. This wouldn't have happened without all the committers and folks offering patches to the project. FreeBSD and all the other projects I mentioned wouldn't be here without the. Thanks!

Re:Congrats FreeBSD

[adolf]

And a lot of closed-source things: FreeBSD != GPL, so one is free to bottle up a bunch of their compiled stuff and sell it without interference.

I, personally, am quite OK with this. (I once owned a TV that I strongly suspect ran FreeBSD; it worked well.)

Re:Congrats FreeBSD

[smash]

It is also the basis of JunOS, Netapps Data OnTap, and various other commercial products. FreeBSD is really under-rated and works very very well.

Re:Congrats FreeBSD

[smash]

It was "BSD" derived, not FreeBSD. BSD is often the birth place of many reference implementations of new standards, due to the truly open nature of the license. Develop a "standard" under the GPL and it won't become standard at all, as no commercial OS will be able to use a starting reference implementation as a base.

Re:Congrats FreeBSD

[jbolden]

Develop a "standard" under the GPL and it won't become standard at all, as no commercial OS will be able to use a starting reference implementation as a base.

Absolutely. And you can see that by noting that:

gcc compatibility C++ source
gnu make's -o extension
Qt API's as a standard for mobility cross platform
Linux kernel API as a standard for emulation (mainframe, supercomputing, mini...)
Wordpress as a blogging standard
Sword standard for bibles
Guile as a standard Scheme
Blender API for 3D modeling
etc...

aren't standards. Oh wait.

Re:FreeBSD's developers CHOSE to not be popular

[stox]

I disagree, as far as real adoption goes. Yes, booting Linux from a floppy using a MSDOS filesystem did enable a lot of people to get exposed, but the race was lost before those people made a difference. Had BSD development not stalled for two years, many of the early commercial and big site adoptions would have gone to BSD instead. Many started with BSD and then jumped to Linux because that is where the momentum was. Red Hat's IPO sealed the deal.

BTW, I introduced Pat Volkerding to the Church of the SubGenius, and pioneered a lot of the early work with Linux at Fermilab. I know a little about these things.