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FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success
21–30 of 139 posts
Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success
#22> success Can somebody elaborate on FreeBSD's "success"?
Sony based the OSes for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on FreeBSD. Netflix uses FreeBSD in production on parts of its infrastructure. Those two alone are pretty nice success stories. And in addition to those are countless other companies quietly running FreeBSD on their servers.
The Nintendo Switch is based on FreeBSD as well. Also Juniper Networks and several other enterprise networking equipment manufacturers make extensive use of FreeBSD in their products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success
#23> success Can somebody elaborate on FreeBSD's "success"?
Being used as foundation for PlayStation OS, Netflix and others. Being available alongside Linux distributions as official supported OS on major cloud vendors. Maybe the contributions to upstream could be better, but that is the choice they decided to make.
>Being used as foundation for PlayStation OS, Netflix and others.
Isn't that thanks to its license? They literally can be used in closed source software without a word of credit.
Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success
#24Love FreeBSD but ...
Really wish there wasn't a split between FreeBSD & Matt Dillon 20-years ago, since DragonflyBSD is so strong and yet FreeBSD hasn't benefited from it's innovations.
They'd truly would be better together than apart.
Can only imagine how much stronger the BSD ecosystem would be overall today, if the past 20-years these teams had been together.
Announcement:
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-Jul...
EDIT: "stronger together" meaning, FreeBSD would benefit from the technology innovations, architecture simplicity and performance that DragonflyBSD brings ... and DragonflyBSD benefiting from the larger install base that FreeBSD has (and it's brand recognition).
Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success
#25> success Can somebody elaborate on FreeBSD's "success"?
Being used as foundation for PlayStation OS, Netflix and others. Being available alongside Linux distributions as official supported OS on major cloud vendors. Maybe the contributions to upstream could be better, but that is the choice they decided to make.
Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success
#26Not to be mean, but I started using Linux in 1992 (yes that early on, from the usenet posting), and I seem to recall hearing a lot more about FreeBSD or the *BSDs about 30 years ago than I do now. In my UNIX circles that I run around in, no one talks about FreeBSD. Honestly asking (yes, I guess I did not read the article) is most of its success on the commercial side? I think it is used in NAS boxes and routers/switc…
Its secret to 'survival' is more appropriate. This article has a lot of fluff. eg: Specifically, companies needing redundancy require more than one operating system, since any single operating system may fall victim to a failure that could take out the entire company’s infrastructure What sort of argument is this. We need multiple political parties. Therefore, our existence is important even if we secure insignifican…
Wasn't there some kind of issue with a leap second sending machines (Linux machines?) off the deep end years ago (and all about the same time)? Conceptually, if you're running a mix of OSs, then there's much less chance of something undiscovered wiping out your entire infrastructure.
There was a story I heard that when working on the avionics for one of their planes, Boeing mandated three separate CPU architectures, with the code developed by three different, isolated, teams, using three different toolsets (languages and runtimes) to minimize the risk of some Unknown Unknown commonality taking them all out. Dunno what actually happened. Could be completely folklore.
Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being used as foundation for PlayStation OS, Netflix and others. Being available alongside Linux distributions as official supported OS on major cloud vendors. Maybe the contributions to upstream could be better, but that is the choice they decided to make.
>Being used as foundation for PlayStation OS, Netflix and others. Isn't that thanks to its license? They literally can be used in closed source software without a word of credit.
Netflix gives back quite a lot. You'll see "Sponsored by: Netfix" quite often in commit messages:
* https://www.freshsource.org/commits.php
There isn't much special secret sauce that Netflix has at the OS layer of things, so there's not much reason for them to keep the patches in-house (and then have to maintain as the public source rolls forward). Other vendors that give back are Dell EMC Isilon (keeping their OneFS code private), Juniper, Netgate, etc.
Sony is unique in that it was a one-time fork, and now that the product is out there's not much churn in things.
Most vendors have learned that keeping things in-house just causes pain down the road when you have to re-base with the latest FreeBSD release.
Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being used as foundation for PlayStation OS, Netflix and others. Being available alongside Linux distributions as official supported OS on major cloud vendors. Maybe the contributions to upstream could be better, but that is the choice they decided to make.
>Being used as foundation for PlayStation OS, Netflix and others. Isn't that thanks to its license? They literally can be used in closed source software without a word of credit.
> They literally can be used in closed source software without a word of credit.
This is not true of any of the "acceptable licenses" listed by FreeBSD.
https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license/
See: the clauses saying "must reproduce/retain the above copyright".
Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success
#29Not to be mean, but I started using Linux in 1992 (yes that early on, from the usenet posting), and I seem to recall hearing a lot more about FreeBSD or the *BSDs about 30 years ago than I do now. In my UNIX circles that I run around in, no one talks about FreeBSD. Honestly asking (yes, I guess I did not read the article) is most of its success on the commercial side? I think it is used in NAS boxes and routers/switc…
Its secret to 'survival' is more appropriate. This article has a lot of fluff. eg: Specifically, companies needing redundancy require more than one operating system, since any single operating system may fall victim to a failure that could take out the entire company’s infrastructure What sort of argument is this. We need multiple political parties. Therefore, our existence is important even if we secure insignifican…
> What sort of argument is this. We need multiple political parties. Therefore, our existence is important even if we secure insignificant votes?
Yes, it keeps userland code honest if you follow the published API and not a specific behaviour. See for example the fsync() saga on Linux:
* https://lwn.net/Articles/752063/
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19238121
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19119991
It's the same reason why porting to obscure CPUs can be useful: DEC Alpha was never popular, but supporting it kind of forced Linux to be 64-bit clean in some ways, so when amd64 came along there was already a bunch of infrastructure in place.
And having 'external parties' that are not part of the same 'tribal structures' and same zeitgeist / group think can allow for experimenting of ideas.
Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success
#30Not to be mean, but I started using Linux in 1992 (yes that early on, from the usenet posting), and I seem to recall hearing a lot more about FreeBSD or the *BSDs about 30 years ago than I do now. In my UNIX circles that I run around in, no one talks about FreeBSD. Honestly asking (yes, I guess I did not read the article) is most of its success on the commercial side? I think it is used in NAS boxes and routers/switc…
That's because 30 years ago, BSD was getting sued by Ma Bell ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc..... ), which is probably the only reason Linux exists.
...though I guess you could also argue that people felt like they had more stake in GPL than BSD-licensed code.