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Comment by pavs | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone tell me the benefits of freebsd over popular Linux server distros (Ubuntu/centos/rhel)?

When your team sort of grew up with FreeBSD (or any other OS) you want to lean that way. Also, when you're shipping an appliance you don't have to think about licenses. Those are the two reasons we stick with FreeBSD.

Thanks. That makes sense.

I am not familiar with limitations of GPL license over BSD license. What limitation does GPL license have that you don't have to worry about with BSD when deploying your app on a Linux server?

Edit: Answered elsewhere. Thanks.

Prime example: NetApp uses (and contributes back to) FreeBSD.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/06/prweb1042664.htm (minor mention)

Licensing. The BSD license is less restrictive than the GPL.

Can you give a non-hypothetical real-life scenario where Freebsd with BSD license helps over GPL license based linux-distro when running a server?

I am genuinely curious.

Not a physical benefit but I suppose it could be argued you're showing support for bsd style licenses. That seems trivial but possible.

Most of the time it's that question that bothers you more when you're using something GPL. If I do X should I release the code or not? BSD eliminates that nagging question from the back of your mind.

Real life situation. You are producing a network appliance of some kind doing high throughput stuff and you have implemented some bits in the kernel. On Linux (GPL) your code is all covered by GPL so your competitors can copy and use it. On FreeBSD you can keep your technology proprietary and away from your conpetitors. This is why FreeBSD is so widely used by network appliances.

not being "popular linux distro" can be a benefit perhaps?

otherwise, I don't see what difference does it make what kernel you're running. matter of taste

For me, it's not really about the kernel but the whole OS, userland included. I agree it's still mostly matter of taste, or maybe more honestly, what you're used to.

Some people really like apt-get/dpkg but I prefer working with "make buildworld/installworld" and the ports system on FreeBSD.

Also, though it's not something I've taken advantage of much, I love how on FreeBSD I can "cd /usr/src/bin/ls" and hey: there's the source for ls! If I wanted to, I could hack it, and run "make install" right there. I prefer this over (for example) source packages with Doogie's Build System on Debian.

recompiling your programs on every machine is such a waste of cloud

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