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Comment by killahpriest | Hacker News Reader

Why the downvotes? The dude is genuinely curious.

I guess

a) because he disqualifies the license as a reason, even though it is actually the reason GNU came to be, without which what most people call "Linux", that is - GNU/Linux would have had little to stand on. So license on its own is an interesting enough reason.

b) because one second of googling would have shown that FreeBSD has numerous technical (his criterion) things that Linux does not yet at a comparable level, including (from the top of my head) ZFS, jails, dtrace.

d) because there are also things which are not license or technical details which matter (project management style, for example)

Comments like the GP can alternatively be phrased: "I'm a bigot about reasons things happen in the real world, and also I'm too lazy to look up if what I believe is actually true. Lazyweb, prove me wrong", and it would get about as many downvotes.

2 of the advantages you've mentioned (zfs,dtrace) are actually gifts from Sun Solaris.

IIRC, linux had lost out on these gems due to licensing issues. Oracle seemed quite keen on developing the zfs-clone btrfs - but after they had gobbled up sun, interest in btrfs seemed to have waned.

Gifts that required quite some man hours of work to port over.

The license would live on without any BSDs around though - most new big projects seem to use BSD or a similar permissive license.

WRT b:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=freebsd+v.s+linux (and g! doesn't help any more)

The "best" resource I could find between those two searches resulted in:

http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/FreeBSD_vs_Linux

I'm not sure of the quality of the results of that page.

Regardless, we've gone well beyond "a second of googling."

> Comments like the GP can alternatively be phrased...

Comments like yours can be phrased "I'm a hateful liar who reasons that unless you blindly accept certain opinions as fact, I'm going to assume that any questions is bigoted. I'll also knowingly require that you search using Google, claiming that you'll find an answer there, though when someone does search, it will immediately discredit my comment. After all, if it only took a second, I could have provided the link that answered the question."

So, by all means, provide the search we should have used that explains what and why the technical advantages of FreeBSD over various Linux distros. It only takes a second.

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01

Well, it took me all of 3 seconds to google "why choose freebsd over linux", and a few more to verify that most of the results I get on this page are relevant. Your google-fu may be weak, or duckduckgo may be.

Tip: if you are in search of information, rather than self-confirmation, try to prove the opposite of what you believe, rather than search for confirmation to your ideas, or even "balanced" info (because you are ALREADY biased, and you need to counter that bias).

Don't attribute your own faults to others. You seem to do a lot of that in your post above.

I was tempted to reply to the original question because it implies that there is (only) one correct way to build an operating system, and once you've arrived at the correct answer any duplication of effort is pointless. I find that a quizzical approach.

I suspect the downvotes come from the way 'diminish' phrased the question. Linux is implicitly being used as the standard against which FreeBSD is measured, but the question implies ignorance of FreeBSD. Imagine the tone of the responses if the OP has written, "I know linux but not FreeBSD. From a technical perspective, where do they not overlap?"

I get the feeling[1] some of the down votes probably come from people who would rather not have every BSD topic plagued by HN's version of the slashdot.org "BSD is dying" meme. It subtracts from the discussion at hand and given "i m not interested in license or philosophy differences" part - the poster didn't really want an honest answer anyway.

1) as in I didn't down vote but assume...

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