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Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

I believe Netflix uses FreeBSD quite a bit?

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

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