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Comment by ausjke | Hacker News Reader

Used freebsd, netbsd and openbsd in the past. FreeBSD for desktop, netbsd for embedded and openbsd for firewall.

I'm happy to see more headlines on BSDs these days, and I can't stop thinking it has something to do with systemd.

I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 and had to stop to check if systemd is installed, it is. Ubuntu operates the same for me today as 12 did. I don't have any issues with it. I wrote a Java system service the other day and installed it with the usual update-rc.d command like I've done in 12 and it runs fine so for me systemd has nothing to do with my choice to stay with Linux, Ubuntu specifically. It certainly wouldn't drive me away, I wasn't aware it was even there. Like Ubuntu, and Linux overall...it just works (apparently).

Desktop users won't notice or care.

Those of us in the trenches doing sysadmin work will definitely notice.

If you run Ubuntu 14.04 you don't run systemd. You have a process called systemd-shim that is some kind of compatability glue for software that requires systemd.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/systemd-shim

If you want to try a real systemd system use a recent Fedora or Arch release.

Having a few high profile companies reliant on FreeBSD has definitely helped. (Thinking of WhatsApp, Netflix and Sony).

and to some extent, Apple.

Edit: FlightAware, as well.

FlightAware here. We use FreeBSD as much as possible. We do have some instances of Linux where necessary. We have several people who have been involved with The FreeBSD Project in the past.

The BSDs show up in a lot of "appliances" as well. Up until a few years ago many load balancers were BSD based. IIRC Juniper is still a FreeBSD shop. Does yahoo still run with ybsd?

Or because the BSDs have been making a lot of milestones lately?

That said, I'd honestly be very interested in any numbers confirming increased interest in the BSDs as a result of systemd integration into GNU/Linux. It's widely speculated, but is there anything concrete to suggest it?

It's less about systemd and more about GPLv3 being rejected by companies -- startups included. The BSD ecosystem is much friendlier to businesses.

…friendlier to businesses… that rely on proprietary restrictions for their business.

Yes, so? Anyone else can take the code and add their own proprietary features too.

If they don't give back to the project it makes their life much harder.

I think the point was "not all businesses". "I run a business" and "I need to keep my code proprietary" are two different statements - neither implies the other (in any logical sense - there is manifestly some correlation).

> The BSD ecosystem is much friendlier to businesses.

That keep their changes private.

I'd argue the BSD ecosystem is friendlier in general. GPL has this odd hostile attitude to it that seems to have only gotten worse of late...a feeling of preparation for war. I'm recalling Sony's presentation on why they chose LLVM/Clang [1], where they rather hated that they had to work on so much in secret, because they couldn't collaborate with the community, even though they didn't have to. Compare that to the FSF's stunts like "Windows 7 Deadly Sins" and you see the rather blatant hostility that seems to run rampant in the GPL camp.

[1] http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-11/slides/Robinson-PS4Toolchain....

Yes, so much that they haven't returned anything back to the community that helped them save development resources (money), or did they?

They do. Here's a pretty extensive test suite that was committed not too long ago http://reviews.llvm.org/rL214126

Thanks for the info.

I can't speak for everyone, but I switched my website and local PCs over to FreeBSD. In my case, after having suffered through years of broken audio from Lennart Poettering's previous grand experiment (and his attitude toward detractors ...), systemd wasn't the only reason -- it was just the bowling ball that broke the camel's back.

I haven't actually used systemd, and I'm sure it runs just fine for most desktop people who don't care how their system boots. But I disagree with nearly all of its design decisions. I strongly value software portability between Linux and BSDs regardless of which OS I am using, I don't believe in making desktop environments like Gnome 3 (and even desktop applications like Brasero) dependent upon a specific init system, I don't believe in monolithic design and prefer stronger decoupling, I prefer text log files to binary log files, I find the documentation on systemd and its APIs appalingly sparse, I am opposed to the heavy-handedness of consuming other libraries like udev, I am greatly opposed to the politics being played out to push its adoption on other distros, on and on.

I've actually found Systemd really great for servers. Writing unit files to start our web apps has been so much easier than the old scripts...

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