What are the most popular markets for the BSDs today? Anything outside of research/edu?
- https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/fosdem/looney-netflix_and_fr...
Serving Traffic at 800Gb/s and beyond
http://nabstreamingsummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/202...
and the HN discussion
There recently was a vendor summit (which happens regularly: every year (?) in November):
> Join us for the November 2023 FreeBSD Vendor Summit. The event will take place November 2-3, 2023. The Summit provides commercial FreeBSD users with the unique opportunity to meet face-to-face with developers and contributors to get features requested, problems solved, and needs met. It also opens up discussion on improving and enhancing the operating system. Registration is now open. The program includes talks from NetApp, Netflix, ARM and more! Register today!
* https://freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/event-calendar...
* https://wiki.freebsd.org/DevSummit
Presentations:
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLugwS7L7NMXzSalaF4l_7...
Lots and lots of use in proprietary appliances. NetApp, Dell/EMC (Isilon), Juniper used to use it on their qfabric network switches, etc.
It’s a solid starting point if you don’t want to have to worry about GPL in a product you don’t intend to open source.
Specifically if you don't want to worry about 'contamination' between your secret sauce and the open source bits.
It's generally a good idea to upstream as much as you can so you're not carrying custom patches internally when you don't have to. See "The Value of Upstream First":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5C97dwIjM8&list=PLugwS7L7NM...
Not because Linux is better, but to fit better within Facebook's operations[1], and Erlang runs on many platforms, so it was a much smaller effort to get our code running on Linux than to get FB's server management software to work for FreeBSD. Server hardware was quite a bit different, so we had no apples to apples comparisons of which OS was more efficient or whatever else. During initial migration, BEAM support of kqueue was much better than epoll, but that got worked out, and I feel like Linux's memory usage reporting is worse than FreeBSD's, but it's a weakness of both. I was never comfortable in the FB server environment, so I left in late 2019, when the FreeBSD server count was reduced to a small enough number that I ran out of things to do.
[1] Much of the server team had experience with acquisitions at Yahoo! and the difficulties of making an operations team focused on one OS support acquired teams on another OS. With the many other technical and policy differences between WA and FB, eliminating the OS difference was an easy choice to reduce friction. Our host count, which was large at SoftLayer, was small at Facebook, even after factoring in increased numbers because the servers were smaller and the operations less stable.
Macs and iPhones maybe?