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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.

6 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Well... by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    Given enough time, Netcraft will confirm...

    --
    Trolling is a art,
    1. Re:Well... by Plunky · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Honest question, who uses NetBSD?

      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.

      Seriously, after 25 years in the business I've never seen or heard about anyone using NetBSD in production ever.

      The licence is liberal, and companies are not obligated to mention their usage.

  2. It just works by approachingZero+ · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
  3. Congrats FreeBSD by laffer1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    --
    MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
  4. FreeBSD's developers CHOSE to not be popular by jphamlore · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:FreeBSD's developers CHOSE to not be popular by camperdave · · Score: 5, Funny

      They openly mocked on their mailing lists the feature of being able to boot into the OS from a floppy drive... The FreeBSD developers CHOSE to not be popular.

      ... and here it is umpteen years later and NOBODY boots from a floppy. Sounds to me like they were just ahead of their time.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!