Why aren’t the *BSD operating systems more popular in the server and workstation spaces?
There are many reasons Linux-based systems are generally much more popular than the BSDs in the server and workstation spaces. Here's why I think that happened:
* GPL vs. BSD license. Repeatedly someone in the BSD community had the bright idea of creating a proprietary OS based on a BSD. All their work was then not shared with the OSS BSD community, and the hires removed expertise from the OSS BSD community. In contrast, the GPL forced the Linux kernel and GNU tool improvements to stay in the community, so every company that participated improved the Linux kernel and GNU tools instead of making their development stagnate. This enabled the Linux kernel in particular to rocket past the BSDs in terms of capabilities.
* Bazaar vs. Cathedral. The BSDs had a small group who tried to build things elegantly (cathedral), mostly in "one big tree". GNU + Linux were far more decentralized (bazaar), leading to faster development. That especially applies to the Linux kernel; many GNU tools are more cathedral-like in their development (though not to the extent of the BSDs), and they've paid a price in slower development because of it.
* Multi-boot Installation ease. For many years Linux was much easier to install than the BSDs on standard x86 hardware. Linux used the standard MBR partitioning scheme, while the BSDs required their own scheme that made it extremely difficult to run a BSD multi-boot setup. For many people computers (including storage) were very expensive - it was much easier to try out Linux (where you could dual-boot) than BSDs. The BSDs required an "all-in" commitment that immediately caused many people to ignore them. I think this factor is underappreciated.
* GNU and Linux emphasis on functionality and ease-of-use instead of tiny-ness. GNU tools revel in all sorts of options (case in point: cat has numerous options) and long-name options (which are much easier to read). The BSDs are often excited about how small their code is and how few flags their command lines have... but it turns out many users want functionality. If tiny-ness is truly your goal, then busybox was generally better once that became available circa 1996 (because it focused specifically on tiny-ness instead of trying to be a compromise between functionality and tiny-ness).
Some claim that the AT&T lawsuit hurt the BSDs, but there was lawsuit-rattling for Linux and GNU as well, so while others will point to that I don't think that was serious factor.
Here's one article discussing this:
https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/open-source-histo...
For me, I ran FreeBSD for about a year around 1999. I lasted about a week before breaking down and installing a GNU userspace. Excellent CLI ergonomics for the day.
Linux had quite a few "easy to install" distros where, if your critical hardware was fully supported, you had something that was easier to get up and running than Windows 95/98. X configurations and sound drivers were a sticking points back then though. BSD had no such "easy mode" gateway drugs.
That's the first time I've ever heard GNU associated with the bazaar. The original thesis of the book (CatB) is the observation that GNU is a cathedral (with saint rms at its head) and Linux (the kernel) is a bazaar.
Do you mean the SCO lawsuit against IBM? Because I would argue that 1) that happened long enough after Linux had established itself that people were too invested to be immediately scared off and 2) people put a lot of faith in IBM and there legal team to defend Linux. I think the community around Linux was able to basically laugh the whole thing off once SCO started presenting their actual "evidence".
Without a large company to defend it and the fact that no one had really started using it for anything serious yet made the AT&T lawsuit against the BSD's look a lot scarier at the time.
All good points by the way, but I do think AT&T rattling their sword did have a pretty chilling effect on BSD adoption as well.
No, pretty sure the parent meant the the USL vs BSDi one. Though I disagree with the parent, and believe it _was_ impactful on BSD adoption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....
I don’t remember anything before SCO so I was curious if there was something before that I missed.
I must admit I was downright obsessed with that case and Groklaw’s coverage at the time so I guess it’s not surprising that it was the first thing I thought of...
The SCO vs. Linux/IBM/the universe travesty that attacked Linux came a little later; that started in 2003 and seems to never really end. There were also legal accusations around that time (circa 2004) about Linux raised by Kenneth Brown (from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution). Both were focused on Linux and not on BSD, and both failed to slow down Linux.
Reasonable people can definitely disagree on whether or not the USL vs. BSDi legal case seriously impacted BSD adoption as compared to Linux. I don't think it was a key factor in the long run. The USL vs. BSDi case was raised in 1992, and resolved in 1994, so the legal issues didn't stick around very long. In addition, the BSDs had a head start and plenty of time to recover after the legal issues were resolved... if legal issues were the only problem. But again, reasonable people can disagree. We'll need two universes, where it did and did not occur, to really answer the question :-).
The SCO lawsuit was a joke and everyone knew it. A bare shell of a company, a mere coat rack they could hang a lawsuit on, was going up against IBM with evidence it wouldn't even release for an embarrassingly long period of time, and when it did, it was laughed out of Slashdot and Groklaw. Microsoft really didn't get its money's worth out of that little venture.
As for lawsuits against GNU, I don't know of any off the top of my head. Can you name one?
When the AT&T lawsuit happened it had the direct effect of steering people from *BSD to Linux at a critical time for both, so I'd say that it was definitely a factor.
That is the exact same question I was asked ~20 years ago regarding Linux vs Windows.
The barrier to entry is higher on *BSD then it is on Linux. But with the appropriate skills/time/energy it is very much worth the effort.
ALL of my edge devices run OpenBSD(since 2011). Most of my Internal servers run FreeBSD (90+%), with the remainder on OpenBSD. I made the decision to migrate away from Linux when SystemD was made default in Debian. In my mind they make more sense. I can grok the config files and Init process. MAN pages are much easier to understand. Network config is brain-dead simple and powerful; that's a combination that shouldn't be overlooked.
I freely admit that I'm an old-fart. My manager thinks I'm a hippy, and my co-workers think I'm a Unix-greybeard. In reality it's just this simple: It does what I want, and gets out of the way.
Those two made an effort to meet directly with business leaders, attend all the trade shows, and gave their product away for free. Their model was at least as shocking as their license; hitherto, hardly any business software was free and paired with consulting services. It caused a storm, and gave birth to a whole industry that wasn't possible under the expensive BSD model.
Solaris was when Sun made the jump to System V. AFAIK part of that was because Sun had financial difficulties at the time and AT&T offered to help them -- in exchange for Sun to rebase on System V.
[1] e.g. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SunOS-4.1.4/us...
Therefore, bedroom hackers would be more likely to be able to install Linux on the hardware they had, not the hardware they wished they had, so they'd reach for Linux when their employer wanted some kind of backroom system that didn't cost an arm and a leg.
Therefore, there was more Linux out there beyond the explicitly techie companies, the ones who'd have already bought Solaris or IRIX or HP-UX, and the current userbase drives both features and future userbase.
Meh. Probably for superficial stuff, yes. But would Linux kill cat(1) if it did some network calls? I bet not. See https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html
I'm sure you could engineering something to kill it also with currently kernel functionality - though I would need to do more research to say what.
Linux just had "more stuff". Without any other particular reason to pick one over the other, most people picked the one with "more stuff". Nobody wanted to install an OS for a server just to find out it couldn't run the latest software, or didn't have the latest drivers. In addition, the userland of the BSDs was different from GNU tools; if you were already installing GNU tools on every other OS you adminned, you might as well run the OS that's based on it. Finally, if you wanted Enterprise support, Linux was the only Open Source choice, afaik.
Some at the timed claimed performance benefits from one or the other, but various benchmarks showed Linux and BSDs each had their respective performance strengths that could generally be overcome by tweaking.
It cast a long shadow over the viability of Berkeley at the height of the UNIX wars, and just as Linux was appearing as a completely independent and unencumbered UNIX supported by the maturation & advocacy of GNU and the FSF.
We probably would have had BSD wars for real not long after, if it had become popular. To some extent, this is by design, as there's no culture or ethos that pushes people back together.
As far as BSD being a mess after base I completely disagree. Using and understanding a package manager makes life pretty simple.
That said if the Linux community did that they would probably realize how silly containers are :)
You also need to do this for any pipeline for any OS.
Seems to me this had nothing to do with licensing or culture, but rather that if you wanted your distribution you'd use the upstream kernel and build your own userland with blackjack and hookers and whatever direction you were interested in, so there's some measure of strong relatedness in the kernel everyone shares. You might add a few modules or patches, but few people bother (or need) to fork the kernel itself.
Since BSDs are systems, if you want to go your own way you fork the entire system (that's literally the genesis of both OpenBSD and Dragonfly).
Outside the server scope, OSX is mainly BSD with a different kernel.
FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD too.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
If you follow the commit logs, you'll regularly see "Sponsored by" messages:
* https://www.freshsource.org/commits.php
Not just for the core OS, but also in ports and also drivers (Intel, Chelsio, Mellonox).
FreeBSD in particular has always been persnickety about acknowledging work done on behalf of others. Something that would have prevented the IBM-SCO lawsuit if Linux had used commit/patch tracking from the beggining.
One of the huge reasons people use FreeBSD is simply licensing. If you dont want to release any source code simply build your custom app on FreeBSD and only include BSD licensed software. Makes being proprietary simple.
Note, this does not mean any companies that do this do not give back to the project, they do in the way of code commits and sometimes donations.
Isilon did not contribute back for a while, and then the FreeBSD project kept moving forward, and so the patches they kept in-house kept getting bigger and bigger, which was overhead in their development.
They've basically caught up now:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneFS_distributed_file_system#...
Isilon and their OneFS was a stand-alone company (like Panasas still is). EMC bought Isilon. Then Dell and EMC merged.
Sure, the pool of currently experienced Linux kernel developers is large compared to the BSDs, but if you hire a smart person (like a Linux kernel developer), and provide them with means, opportunity, and motive you'll have a BSD kernel developer soon enough.
Commercial support and network effects and costs of running multiple operating systems are more likely to be a deciding factor than developer availability. If you need to run someone else's software, it probably runs on Linux or Windows. If you run a BSD for your stuff, and Linux for theirs, that means you'll probably need more people to understand both.
If you're going to run on other people's hardware, Linux is almost always supported, although there's been some movement on BSD in clouds. Like with other niche platforms, if it's not currently supported and you want to do it, you might need to do the work -- there's a lot less community to rely on to magically make things work.
It's not just about the kernel. You're talking about entire ecosystems of core utilities, filesystems, network stacks, security mechanisms, virtualization and resource-control subsystems (e.g. cgroups), performance profiling and tuning, etc. They're different systems from top to bottom, just like when I switched from 4.3 to V.2 thirty years ago.
> Commercial support
Stop right there. FAANG companies aren't going to buy support contracts. They'll hire the maintainers instead (like they did with me and hundreds of others like me at my current company). They're not going to split that effort across multiple platforms. They'll focus on one, then hire thousands of developers who don't even realize the tools and interfaces they use are Linux-specific. Then all of the wannabes will copy them, for the reasons I already mentioned. The network effect has gone way beyond any chance of reversal. Sorry.
It spread FUD and prevented people from developing on BSD, and steered them towards Linux.
This is from memory, maybe someone else can fill in the details.
...this can be a show stopper
I can run same set of docker containers that make up an app, including scaling multiple instances of each container, on (1) my macbook, (2) my ubuntu linux laptop, (3) my centos server (4) my windows laptop, (5) my other windows laptop, (6) my client's windows server.
I can do this without bothering to configure my app specifically, or without even knowing or learning what the dependencies of my app are!
BSD's are the "loner children" playing by themselves while everyone expects to have everything running everywhere and expect it by default...
Sorry, but unless effort is made to embrace kuber and docker, the niche will shrink.
One way out of the problem is to have entities like the FreeBSD foundation the OpenBSD devs invest effort into Docker development to make it capable of running BSD containers inside it... but this will never happen because of endless ego :|
writing a gui to spin up the VM flavor du-jour with one hipster command that you can show in an animated terminal in your bloated website doesn't make something cross platform underneath the hood, and that same VM runtime could run just about anything else.
and no, i don't miss the point. you miss the point - you are arguing market share as if it is technical merit. I'll take 1 true school unix hacker over 5 million 'noders' who cant debug their super hip k8s clusters they provisioned 'in the cloud' with wget|sh when they break.
People like Google can't pay enough? Do all the BSD developers work as front-end quants or something? How are they all earning so much that nobody can afford them?
Yahoo! did but they also had BSD developers on the payroll.
Any Silicon Valley company will pay enough but that is why when you leave Silicon Valley or a big tech hub everything is windows. The pay attracts the talent.
Linux has become mainstream so there are more people in the talent pool to pay to support it.
Windows ... has more so it is cheaper
BSD simply doesn't have enough people who know the system well enough to support it
Paying 5 developers to build something cool doesn't mean you have the support system to run it.... You actually need people who understand your product to use it as a business system
In some ways & depending on the situation, moreso, since linux distros are often trying to do things drastically different from each other in order to differentiate themselves, whereas BSD's are often sharing code because of the small developer base, sharing-compatible license, and lack of bottom-line oriented corporate sponsorship.
Used to be a system admin could modify a kernel module in linux. These days its getting hard to find one who can use the CLI properly
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140506132000
Google also has donated to the OpenBSD foundation historically in relatively small amounts: https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html
In general, *BSDs take more time to work out technical details, make sure that the design is right.
The approach in the Linux communtity is much more, release something that mostly works now and fix it later.
Little orthogonal: It sort of rhymes with the mono repository versus collection of micro repositories mindset. Does BSD have more code reuse since it is whole system?
It used to be fashionable to run BSD on security focused machines (like firewalls). I'm not sure why Linux won there too.
State actors are now targeting whole populations. It takes less and less time to enumerate the entire IPv4 address space. Knowledge about hacking is becoming more and more accessible to a larger group of people. This problem is not going away - it is growing larger for every year.
If you don't believe me: Just attach an object to the internet and watch the logs.
Yep, but you have to grade it based on likelyhood. Which costs more, a thing that doesn't work right now or a thing that might not work in the future, maybe. If you can make it work now and be secure, good, otherwise people will, quite rationally, prefer that it work.
OpenBSD has much more complete and accurate documentation, which is a plus when you're debugging a problem.
I would opine that Linux won because it was familiar but not ideal - see also people trying to shoehorn Windows into embedded systems where a unix variant would be a more ideal pick.