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Comment by cimnine | Hacker News Reader

The OS of PS4 and PS5 is apparently based on FreeBSD. Netflix uses FreeBSD for its CDN servers. pfSense and OPNsense are popular firewalls that are based on FreeBSD.

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JunOS from Juniper is also based off of FreeBSD (I think they're moving to Linux, though) as (were?) NetApp filers (they made heavy use of the Berkley FFS snapshots back in the day).

FreeBSD was popular for many appliances, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as it was generally rock-solid, had very mature networking, and the legal departments at the time liked the more permissive licence.

It's getting less and less common to see it, though. Sheer market share numbers mean performance, driver support, user familiarity, and companies no longer being afraid of the GPL mean that has Linux pretty much taken over.

It makes me a bit sad, but the OS on most Juniper gear is just a control plane for ASICs nowadays and NetApp has moved on to more advanced filesystems. Finding developers to write drivers/software for Linux is probably an order of magnitude easier.

They are scared shirtless of GPL-3 though. See all the hoops that apple jump through to avoid it.

That’s related to anti-tivolization in GPLv3 and basically Apple is forced to stop shipping things that’s updated to GPLv3. That’s not just about scared, assuming being scared means they are irrational and they could have adopted it if they want. Legally they cannot ship it unless they are changing their business model.

They could though. They're just being overly cautious.

All it forbids is blocking users from running modified FOSS code which macOS doesn't do. You can compile what you want and run it in Xcode. Even on iOS you can do this.

What TiVo did was shipping FOSS code but not giving users any access to their device.

But Apple enforces code-signing, and that prevents them to ship those binaries under GPLv3 in the OS. The users can always compile them on their own (or via their favorite package manager) but Apple just can't ship it (without changing how they operate fundamentally.)

For a new, buzzy company: Antithesis built their hypervisor on it.

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