FreeBSD is a great server OS. With VM's hardware support gets less important for some use cases. IE LAMP.
The ports selection in FreeBSD is second to none. Linux has nothing close.
JuniperOS is retooled freebsd.
Lots of imbedded projects are based on BSD and always will be. The insanity of GPL licensing.
GPL3 is for activists and manifesto's. LGPL, GPL2 more then covered it for non activists.
Same with Orbis OS, the OS powering PS4.
Well... I don't know about that. The Debian repositories seem quite close to that offering, at least by their breadth. Arch Linux's core repositories offer a high quality up-to-date minimal set, while their community and AUR repos offer a very wide set of 3rd party software, even if the latter is not always reliable.
Even though I like a lot about FreeBSD, I always found the ports the most awkward and error-prone part of it. And it's far too flexible, which for me was not worth the burden.
Speaking of, I wish jail-based FreeBSD VPSs were more widely available and cheaper. Where I've seen them the price is such that their use is hard to justify compared to Linux containers on RamNode or Digital Ocean.
Isn't this called "shared FreeBSD hosting with shell access"? Like http://djangoeurope.com/ used to be, I think (I see they're Debian based now)...
[citation needed].
If you mean Linux-just-the-kernel, sure? But that's not really comparable.
Every Linux distro has a collection of 3rd-party packages; neither FreeBSD's 3rd party package integration (ports) nor breadth of software is particularly exceptional in this space.
And FreeBSD doesn't seem to attract as many volunteers to keep its port collection up to date, or at least that has been my experience.
> Lots of imbedded projects are based on BSD and always will be. The insanity of GPL licensing.
Sure. I work on a BSD-derived embedded system at $DAYJOB. But the GPL doesn't prevent Linux use in lots of spaces.
Linux itself is fine with the GPL. Thats an OS only.
The problem is usually the Linux dist. Their solution to the packages problem is to include the kitchen sink.
Licensing is along the lines of "what's that". Ergo you use FreeBSD (or one of the others) when you need to have something to satisfy lawyers.
It's all tracked.
Companies can modify some minor bit for their "secret sauce" and bundle it up inside the vacuum cleaner. Not the hacker version.
Since the internet of the future is the "internet of things" that's kinda important.
Fedora tracks licenses on a package by package basis. You can fairly easily determine what the license of a library you use is, and recursively examine dependencies to see if there is something objectionable in there.
FreeBSD ships GPLv3 ports (gcc47, ...). So... it's not just smooth sailing there, either.
No need to hate on either platform.