The ATT lawsuit stopped BSD development for a year or so and many people moved to the Linux community during this time, because of the uncertainty caused be the lawsuit.
I think the big difference in culture accounts for more than the lawsuit.
FreeBSD moves very carefully. New features are introduced when they are quite mature. For major changes, the old way of working is maintained for quite some time.
Early nineties that showed in hardware support. If you wanted to have a real system, you got yourself a SCSI card. There were some really crap IDE controllers out there and in the FreeBSD community nobody cared for them. So resources is one thing, but basically the FreeBSD community didn't want to spend time getting completely broken hardware sort of working.
(For a long time, partitioning was also a twisted maze. The BSD partitioning scheme was somehow combined with the MBR in weird ways. No problem for a system dedicated to FreeBSD, tricky if you want to shared with Windows).
The Linux community was way more trying to run on everything.
In the same way, the Linux community is much more into shiny, new. Color ls, that would famously break scripts because it also output escape sequences if you send the output to a pipe.
By and large a FreeBSD system looks less cool than a Linux. So FreeBSD attracts the users who know they want stability above everything else.
>The Linux community was way more trying to run on everything.
In contrast to some opinions, I like this sometimes.
For example, would the world come to an end if FreeBSD came with neovim?
If the prompt out of the box showed pwd?
I know that some things are controversial (ahem systemd), but when learning a new system, little things matter and make your system popular.
(And, as a side rant, in contrast to some who like to use haskell on nixos (Which I actually like!) running on an obscure chipset, popularity is good. If someone asked me what Unix should he learn, I'd send him to Linux and not FreeBSD, since it's going to be much easier to find noob help online. Then, this noob will go on to become a sysadmin, he'll recommend Linux because he knows it and will be able to find others who do.)
That's a bit like asking Debian to be more like Ubuntu. And I have seen plenty of software that only works on Ubuntu, on other Linux distros you are on your own.
For an end-user friendly BSD you may want to look at TrueOS (https://www.trueos.org/). They take FreeBSD and then add more sauce to provide a better user experience.
True, hence why so many products are built on top of FreeBSD. But for organizations not shipping Linux binaries the license doesn't change much. Also Linux is a pretty awesome operating system so it doesn't make much sense for lot's of organizations to switch to FreeBSD even if there are some advantages to using FreeBSD.
I do feel like it has a comparative advantage in all of those spaces. ZFS, jails, and pf are all killer features for all of those spaces. The only possible draw back is it requires your IT staff know the technologies. What a company saves on licensing easily makes up for the staff wages though...maybe.
Good to hear! FreeBSD is my favorite OS and I wish I could use it at work, but were a CentOS/RHEL and Windows shop. However the security team has a handful of FreeBSD servers going, so it is used.
>But for organizations not shipping Linux binaries the license doesn't change much.
hmmm.. Android, Chromebook, Smart TV's, Routers, set-top boxes, NAS etc, these all ship Linux binaries, so I don't think it's a big issue.
If you do kernel space modifications which you want to keep as a 'competitive advantage', then going with something like FreeBSD instead of Linux would make perfect sense, otherwise I don't see why the license would matter much.
It is the pain of complying with the license. You have to ensure you have everything in place just in case someone asks for the source code. It isn't hard, but it is effort that nobody wants to do yet you have to. It isn't good enough to say "we use version 1.2.3 unmodified download that from the internet", you actually have to have a copy of version 1.2.3 ready to send out (apparently in case the internet deletes all versions of source code 1.2.3).
