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Comment by jamesy0ung | Hacker News Reader

This comment probably comes off as ignorant, but what is the point of BSD today? The only use I see is for ZFS because it is built in.

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One obvious point ignoring all technology differences would be the license. I always like to have more options and even though I haven't used a BSD in maybe 5 years now, I'm still very happy they exist.

I'm most fond of OpenBSD and am VERY happy the project exists. OpenSSH alone makes the project a winner for me.

I also miss the documentation (man files) of the BSDs. They always seemed clearer to me than my current Linux counterparts.

Just to piggyback on this, the source code for the BSD utils is eminently readable and simple, almost always more so than the equivalent GNU options. I understand that there are reasons for this, and I'm obviously very grateful for all sorts of GNU software. But if I want to see how something works, I'm going to go for the BSD sources first if they exist.

Lots of reasons, but often not what you think of as a typical desktop or server OS. FreeBSD is often used by corporations as a base to build things on because of its more generous license. Playstation's OS is based on FreeBSD. NetBSD is used on lower power or exotic devices since it is designed to be very portable, and is used as a base for some rump kernels and being able to compile device drivers into application software. OpenBSD is quite popular for bastions, routers, and firewalls because it is easy to administer, secure by default, and has pf for firewall rules. It is also a research OS and can experiment with changing things or deprecating things more quickly.

And some of it is just preference and what you need it for. I run OpenBSD servers because I like how administration works, it is secure by default, upgrades are extremely easy, and all of the software I need works on it.

> because of its more generous license

Gifting an OS to companies that use it to compete against the FLOSS ecosystem. That's a bit of a self-own.

The classic counterexample is GCC, which so contorted its design to prevent being embedded in proprietary software, that it allowed LLVM to take off as a powerful competitor not only due to its friendly license but also by virtue of being architected in a way easier to integrate with IDE software. Stallman’s own self‐own.

GCC "allowed" LLVM to exits by not having the same license as LLVM in the first place? That's some circular logic.

No, irrespective of GCC’s license, Stallman intentionally hampered GCC’s output to be difficult to use with other free software, in hopes that it would also be difficult to use with proprietary software. See this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26397634

...and the conversations was about license so stop shifting the goalposts.

Different purpose, which succeeded. It is a different philosophy to not be jealous of whatever use someone may make of it, even to making money. Why force a commercial venture to duplicate work if you can help them as well? If you can release high quality software which gets used and advances the state of the art _everywhere_, then that sounds like a good deal. I understand why copyleft might be useful in some circumstances, Linux has gained great adoption with the commercial tech giants because of it, but there is room for all philosophies in the code world; and they suit different purposes and temperaments. Some people simply feel happy that their high quality code is adopted and used, maybe they play Playstation and are happy they contributed to high quality entertainment, the world is a better place because of it.

15 PB of scientific data in our research company is served in production for twelve years using ZFS on FreeBSD and never failed one second. Billions of files replicated using ZFS send and receive streams in mere seconds. It's only flaw, ZFS diff is slow and gives inaccurate results. Grassroots I'am exploring are Minio and WeedFS and maybe Ceph.

I believe Netflix uses FreeBSD quite a bit?

FreeBSD is also the base for JunOS, used by every Juniper Device.

ZFS is great, jails are great (much clearer and simpler than the complexity of containers on Linux), the properly integrated OS can still do little usability things that Linux can't like ^T. But mostly it's just stable and reliable and doesn't keep changing how everything works. Sound is still OSS. Network configuration is still ifconfig. The whole devfs/hal/udev mess was much less of a mess. I don't have to deal with systemd changing how everything works.

Frankly I'd turn your question around: FreeBSD does everything that Linux used to do for me, better than Linux does. So what's the point of Linux today?

Since the original post is about OpenBSD and the parent is about FreeBSD, just some addition:

1. ZFS is not supported in OpenBSD. Here's why OpenBSD doesn't have ZFS (pretty much every other BSD does): https://old.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/7xsx8u/why_doesnt_... (There's probably a better link out there)

2. Jails are not supported in OpenBSD. AFAIK, they are a FreeBSD-only feature.

I'm caught in a strange situation where my MacBook Pro wireless is supported by OpenBSD (and not FreeBSD) but I really like ZFS and Jails. Some features like those about trackpads, sound, wireless "just work" in a basic Arch install but not on FreeBSD. So I'd take "FreeBSD does everything that Linux used to do for me" with a grain of salt, because that has not been true for me.

OpenBSD does have pledge, on the other hand. And yeah, different systems have different features and tradeoffs; some people could legitimately say to take "Linux does everything that FreeBSD used to do for me" with a grain of salt, because that has not been true for them (say, if they like ZFS + boot environments, which is a relative pain on Arch).

I still haven't gotten boot from encrypted root pool with GRUB set up properly; it fails and drops to initramfs, I manually import and mount, after which it continues boots fine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have summarized many of the points here:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/

Thanks! This article was good.

Thanks :)

OpenBSD is the place where ssh development happens, as well as LibreSSL and some smaller projects.

Just think of BSD as a much better version of Linux.

That's not a good argument. It's just as bad as 'I use Arch BTW'. No explanation or reasons given.

Linux does all the arguing for me.

It makes a great router.

As a refuge from Linux, Windows and / or OS X.

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