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cheema33HNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I think you've hit the nail on the head

… I think you've hit the nail on the head. I used to work for a very very large company. And they had a very strong preference for BSD licensed software, if we were building something using outside software. A few years ago, Stever Balmer and others spent a lot of time calling spreading FUD by calling Linux and GPL a "cancer". Believe it or not, that stuff had a massive impact. Not on small shops, but large company lawyers. Over the years, Steve left Microsoft and Microsoft has become a lot more Linux friendly. And the cancer fear has subsided. But it was very very real. On a side note, if I recall correctly, Steve Jobs wanted to use Linux for MacOS. But he had licensing concerns and called up Linus and asked him to change a few things. Linus gave him the middle finger and that is how we got MacOS with BSD.

Original discussionThe Magical Mystery Merge Or Why we run FreeBSD-current at Netflix (2023) [pdf]111 source comments · at import
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DA
davidwHN

> There's a reason it's the core of Juniper routers, Isilon and Netapp storage heads, every Playstation 3/4/5, and got mashed into NeXTSTEP to spawn macOS. Licensing? FreeBSD is a fine OS that surely has some advantages here and there, but I'm also inclined to think that big companies can make stuff work if they want to. PHP at Meta seems like a pretty good example of this.

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SO
SoftTalkerHN

I doubt this story about Linus and Steve. MacOS is NEXTSTEP-derived and that pre-dated Linux by several years.

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IN
inopinatusHN

Be all that as it may, this is still a “why not Linux” line of thinking, rather than “why FreeBSD”, which is the more interesting question. And it is not a binary choice.

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MB
mburnsHN

> On a side note, if I recall correctly, Steve Jobs wanted to use Linux for MacOS. Steve offered Linus a job, using Linux was never on the table. https://www.theverge.com/2012/3/22/2893581/linus-torvalds-li...

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YA
yamanawabiHN

It's a mix of licensing and performance/stability. The licensing ensures that a company can implement their own IP and not have to contribute that back to the community as open source. The performance/stability of FreeBSD is no joke, that's why, as mentioned previously, storage vendors like Isilon and Netapp choose FreeBSD as the base. They can contribute upstream when needed, but they don't have to provide any source for how their storage appliance software. https://freebsdfoundation.org/testimonial/isilon/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/end-user-stories/

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