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hapless

It is only the 9th. Look at the marks of this year against prior years:

December 09, 2012: $260k ($500k goal)

December 14, 2011: $210k ($400k goal)

December 16, 2010: $210k ($350k goal)

Early Dec, 2010: $195k ($350k goal)

December 26, 2009: $250k ($300k goal)

It looks like the last weeks of December are a big time for donations, and they're seeing an early surge relative to prior years. It surprises me that FreeBSD is even this well-funded. Who still uses it?

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> Who still uses it?

Dell, Citrix, F5, Juniper, Netapp...

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

Dell bought an existing company.

Cisco bought an existing company, and the product is stagnant.

Citrix bought an existing company, and the product is stagnant.

F5 went to Linux many years ago

Juniper is still FreeBSD. They win this one ;)

NetApp has a port to Linux, but is still shipping FreeBSD. 50/50.

Nokia/CheckPoint went to Linux (SecurePlatform)

Juniper Networks is actively hiring software engineers with FreeBSD experience:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-jobs/2012-Novembe...

And they're not the only ones...

> NetApp has a port to Linux, but is still shipping FreeBSD. 50/50.

This is the first I've heard of this. Source?

I too would be interested, I was at NetApp when they acquired Spinnaker which was using Linux and that product was ported over to FreeBSD. That said NetApp has been a huge supporter of getting solid NFS support in Linux both through the pNFS effort and the work that was done at Citi/UMich.

http://partners.netapp.com/go/techontap/matl/sample/0206tot_...

That post is 6 years old and ONTAP has been through at least 3 major releases since then.

Additionally, the post states that the purpose of ONTAP on Linux was to simulate ONTAP for testing & education purposes. In 2006 this was probably the easiest way, but those needs have been met for years by the VMware images NetApp provides.

So, this almost certainly does not exist anymore.

I heard during some NetApp training I took (not certain how authoritative my instructor was)that Data OnTap was a customized version of FreeBSD 4.x, which has long since been EOL. While I believe NetApp did contribute back some things to the FreeBSD tree way back in the day, I would guess they haven't in many, many years (but that's pure speculation on my part).

Quite the opposite, in fact. NetApp have contributed BHyVe (http://bhyve.org/ / http://wiki.freebsd.org/BHyVe), a full BSD-licensed Hypervisor, in the last year. They make regular contributions to several network card drivers and other low-level code. At least one or two FreeBSD committers are full-time members of NetApp staff.

That's good to hear. It cancels some of my ill-will toward the company due to the ZFS lawsuit.

> Who still uses it?

Apparently Netflix, http://opsec.eu/backup/OpenConnectDeploymentGuide-v2.4a.pdf

> Who still uses it?

Usually people running away from Linux, Drepper-isms, Oppan Poettering Styles, and the like.

Doesn't everybody love the smell of bikesheds in the morning?

Um...what.

> Who still uses it?

I dunno, everyone in the world running Mac OS X?

OS X has a BSD subsystem, but is based on the XNU kernel (Darwin). It's not FreeBSD in any realistic sense.

OS X does have it's own kernel (Darwin), but a number of it's subsystems were directly derived from FreeBSD.

Apple's developer site has a page listing the pieces of FreeBSD which were incorporated into OS X:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwi...

The NeXT and Rhapsody kernels used NetBSD as the basis for their BSD subsystem, OS X used FreeBSD as the basis for its BSD subsystem.

You are technically correct that it isn't FreeBSD but, for most intents and purposes, Mac OS X re-uses many parts of FreeBSD.

> The NeXT and Rhapsody kernels used NetBSD as the basis for their BSD subsystem

NeXT started in the mid-80s (I first used a NeXT cube in 1988), and ceased to exist in 1996. NetBSD didn't exist until 1993...

[My impression is that NeXT for a long time used the same "non-server" version of Mach that was generally used at CMU at the time (BSD code originally derived from 4.3BSD still in the actual kernel, not as a separate subsystem).]

>My impression is that NeXT for a long time used the same "non-server" version of Mach that was generally used at CMU at the time (BSD code originally derived from 4.3BSD still in the actual kernel, not as a separate subsystem).

Right, NeXtStep was derived from Mach 2.5 which had a 4.3BSD emulation layer (still running in the kernel though) on a Mach "not yet a microkernel" (Mach transitioned to a full Microkernel in Mach 3.0 when the BSD emulation moved out from kernel to userspace). When it became OS X, the BSD emulation layer was updated to 4.4BSD (from FreeBSD) and the Mach part was updated to Mach 3.0. As an aside, Apple even experimented with a Linux Emulation Layer on top of a real Mach Microkernel (mklinux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux) and as the work done in bringing this up actually was put into getting Mach upto 3.0 on xnu (along with the BSD update).

The other Unix which derived from Mach 2.5 was OSF/1->Digital UNIX->Tru64 UNIX.

Thank you. +1, would read again. I have no mod points.

That's encouraging -- maybe they'll even be able to exceed their goal!

> Who still uses it?

Read the rest of the comments in this thread :)

Nice to see that the amound they manage to get seem to increase (which I admit is a guess but the numbers wouldn't make sense otherwise as they wouldn't keep asking for more if they didn't manage to get what they asked for or close to it).

>> Who still uses it? Try searching menu config for /bsd :-)

Um, I think Yahoo. Certainly cperciva.

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