Hacker News Reader

Comment by CodeCompost | Hacker News Reader

> success

Can somebody elaborate on FreeBSD's "success"?

Frankly, the fact that it survived 30 years (and is still very actively used and developed and deployed) counts as success in my mind.

Being used as foundation for PlayStation OS, Netflix and others.

Being available alongside Linux distributions as official supported OS on major cloud vendors.

Maybe the contributions to upstream could be better, but that is the choice they decided to make.

>Being used as foundation for PlayStation OS, Netflix and others.

Isn't that thanks to its license? They literally can be used in closed source software without a word of credit.

Netflix gives back quite a lot. You'll see "Sponsored by: Netfix" quite often in commit messages:

* https://www.freshsource.org/commits.php

There isn't much special secret sauce that Netflix has at the OS layer of things, so there's not much reason for them to keep the patches in-house (and then have to maintain as the public source rolls forward). Other vendors that give back are Dell EMC Isilon (keeping their OneFS code private), Juniper, Netgate, etc.

Sony is unique in that it was a one-time fork, and now that the product is out there's not much churn in things.

Most vendors have learned that keeping things in-house just causes pain down the road when you have to re-base with the latest FreeBSD release.

From what I've heard, they use FreeBSD pretty much just in their CDN appliances. Apparently their application servers are mainly Linux.

There's a lot of weird reasons why you'd use FreeBSD in storage appliances that I have mixed feelings about.

https://freshbsd.org/freebsd?q=%22Sponsored+by+Netflix%22

3,975 commits.

> They literally can be used in closed source software without a word of credit.

This is not true of any of the "acceptable licenses" listed by FreeBSD.

https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license/

See: the clauses saying "must reproduce/retain the above copyright".

>See: the clauses saying "must reproduce/retain the above copyright".

Yeah, you will see the copyright if you are working at the company. Outsiders would never know it's a fork.

Read the licenses more closely.

Work in a project with BSD-licensed stuff.

If you're fine with violating the license, then there is nothing stopping you from closing the source to GPL licensed software without a word of credit. I'm not sure what your point is.

No need to violate the license, just close the source and no outsider would know it's a fork.

See clause 2 of both BSD licenses.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...

Sony based the OSes for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on FreeBSD.

Netflix uses FreeBSD in production on parts of its infrastructure.

Those two alone are pretty nice success stories.

And in addition to those are countless other companies quietly running FreeBSD on their servers.

The Nintendo Switch is based on FreeBSD as well. Also Juniper Networks and several other enterprise networking equipment manufacturers make extensive use of FreeBSD in their products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...

The switch kernel / Horizon/NX is not based on FreeBSD. This has been debunked over and over. The wikipedia list is not correct in that regard.

see e.g. https://youtu.be/Ec4NgWRE8ik?t=700

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27109219

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17534593

Thanks, I stand corrected on the Nintendo Switch!

With heavy use in Netflix's CDN resulting in something like more than 15% of internet traffic being delivered by FreeBSD, that's some kind of success I imagine.

macOS is based on FreeBSD.

While it has a bunch of FreeBSD code stuffed into it, it's not actually based on it.

Yeah I hear this statement a lot too but macos is based on nextstep much more than it was on FreeBSD.

Of course nextstep borrowed some userland from FreeBSD and I think this is where the confusion originates. The actual kernel is totally different though.

And I think the userland got a bit of a refresh from current FreeBSD when OS-X came out.

Eh, sort of. NextStep was more 4.4BSD based. MacOS trasitioned to FreeBSD elements.

And the kernel space for both absolutely have a lot of BSD code, more than the Mach or IO/Kit portions last time I checked.

> macOS is based on FreeBSD.

Regarding OS-X/macOS:

  The fundamental services and primitives of the OS X kernel
  are based on Mach 3.0. Apple has modified and extended
  Mach to better meet OS X functional and performance goals.

(source: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...)

Some portions of the OS-X/macOS kernel are based on FreeBSD however:

  The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily from FreeBSD ...

(source: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...)

As the above states:

  The BSD component of the OS X kernel is complex.

It is correct to say some parts of OS-X/macOS are based on FreeBSD, but not to the point of making an unconditional assertion. As to user-land utilities, many are the same as found in a FreeBSD distribution.

A little more.. Apple hired Jordan K. Hubbard, the FreeBSD co-founder, back in 2001 to work in the Core OS Engineering Department. His role at that time was manager, BSD technology at Apple, overseeing the BSD Technology Base for Darwin, the UNIX-based core of Mac OS X.

I remember a very early release of Darwin, was interested at the time to see if it would eventually become a standalone product, but it never did. I assume there was a lack of corporate support, much like how Google is now trying to slowly close AOSP via removing core pieces like the dialer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com