Why don't companies use FreeBSD as much in production as Linux?

How is Linux more portable than BSD?! NetBSD has been ported to nearly every platform known to man, even toasters.

I'm surprised that more embedded devices don't run some sort of BSD because they wouldn't have to release code. The PS4's OS is FreeBSD, which they did release a lot of code in return, but they don't have to open source or release all their code (i.e. DRM and other "Security" based stuff) if they don't want to.

I used to run everything on FreeBSD. It's a great operating system and incredibly stable and I loved every minute of sysadminning a FreeBSD box. Honestly, what changed was Ubuntu. Being able to have a fairly robust server on the cheap and maintain it fairly well with just a few apt-get commands was a huge game changer.

Admittedly I haven't tried running FBSD since 4/5 timeframe and I'm sure quite a bit has changed since then, but I used to spend hours trying to patch and compile upgrades to software. The ports system that they used at the time (and might still use for all I know) was great for installing stuff, but if something didn't exist in ports or was a few version behind, you were compiling and installing from source.

aptitude has 99.99% of everything I've ever needed to install and manage and some of the newer package management systems like npm and the like cover everything else. What used to be hours each week of administration work has become minutes a month. It might be less secure, it might be slightly less robust, but overall I don't even think about systems administration anymore and (to me) that's such a huge savings in time that it's just not worth trying to go back.

And as emersonrsantos mentioned, I can almost guarantee that every hosting provider has Ubuntu in some form or another. If I need to move to a new host, I can have the system set up and be in business in probably less than an hour. What used to take a few full-time sysadmins has now been replaced by a handful of devops guys that not only manage the systems, but also help my engineers automate and improve our development workflow and pipelines. And, as he also mentioned, I can throw a rock and hit a Linux guy. Finding a FreeBSD expert is nearly impossible and they always cost a lot more.

But, it was my first unix and I've got a lot of love in my heart for the BSD way of doing things. (NetBSD and OpenBSD are other fond loves of mine). I ran a hosting company in the early 00s that was powered entirely by OpenBSD off cheap commodity hardware. And NetBSD runs on everything, which is also a pretty cool plus.

These days, I'm content knowing that my kickass Mac desktops owe their existence to the OS I grew up loving.

I use OpenBSD for quite a few services, but end up using FreeBSD for my file servers (OpenZFS). If the progress on multiple CPU usage and virtualization continues on OpenBSD, the only real thing holding me back from getting rid of FreeBSD is the filesystem. I am looking at the progress of HAMMER2 on DragonFlyBSD to see if it is a good fit.

I have vendors that require a certain OS. Often, its not even "Linux", its "Red Hat Enterprise version 6.x". If you've ever dealt with an Enterprise Software Vendor, you know the added level of fun of using something other than the strict requirements given. Red Hat is the new Windows for government vendors I've had to deal with.

It comes down to the fact that there are more people familiar with linux than BSD. Orders of magnitude more in the US. Unless you're working on something where the GPL is a concern, it's easier to default to linux.