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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.
Let's explode that myth. Here's what actually happened. Linux distributions such as Slackware back then supported booting from a floppy into the OS so that one could run the rest of the userland from a hard drive. That meant one could preserve Microsoft Windows booting yet run Linux at the same time with no risk. I cannot stress how important a feature that was back then to someone like me, back when PCs were very expensive and had to be shared among family members. The FreeBSD developers took a different tack. Their OS was for grown-ups, for servers. They openly mocked on their mailing lists the feature of being able to boot into the OS from a floppy drive. (Note this is different from being able to INSTALL from floppy, everyone back then could do that.) The FreeBSD developers CHOSE to not be popular.
Well I do, and moreover I personally have written ~30 thousand lines of code for NetBSD which has been used in other OS projects (the other BSDs, and OpenSolaris at least - see Bluetooth code) in varying amounts, and I am certainly not the only one to have had code re-used. The NetBSD libc is being used for Android now, I believe.
Also, many companies do use it, though they don't always advertise that fact.
The licence is liberal, and companies are not obligated to mention their usage.