I struggle to find a use for BSD outside of my opnsense VM. *BSD makes for a great gateway device (OpenBSD w/ HAProxy & CARP) and I've used it for that, but even for a webserver, I can't justify it over Linux if I want to run .NET-anything (only unofficial ports exist).
What are the most popular markets for the BSDs today? Anything outside of research/edu?
> What are the most popular markets for the BSDs today? Anything outside of research/edu?
There recently was a vendor summit (which happens regularly: every year (?) in November):
> Join us for the November 2023 FreeBSD Vendor Summit. The event will take place November 2-3, 2023. The Summit provides commercial FreeBSD users with the unique opportunity to meet face-to-face with developers and contributors to get features requested, problems solved, and needs met. It also opens up discussion on improving and enhancing the operating system. Registration is now open. The program includes talks from NetApp, Netflix, ARM and more! Register today!
> It’s a solid starting point if you don’t want to have to worry about GPL in a product you don’t intend to open source.
Specifically if you don't want to worry about 'contamination' between your secret sauce and the open source bits.
It's generally a good idea to upstream as much as you can so you're not carrying custom patches internally when you don't have to. See "The Value of Upstream First":
The Nintendo Switch and the PS4 both use modified versions of FreeBSD, though "modified" could mean "changed so much as to be nearly indistinguishable".
WhatsApp is no longer running FreeBSD. Prior to acquisition, everything was bare metal managed hosting at SoftLayer and we had all FreeBSD except one Linux host for reasons I can't remember (maybe an expirement for calling?). After acquisition, there was a migration to Facebook hosting that included moving to Facebook's flavor of containerized Linux.
Not because Linux is better, but to fit better within Facebook's operations[1], and Erlang runs on many platforms, so it was a much smaller effort to get our code running on Linux than to get FB's server management software to work for FreeBSD. Server hardware was quite a bit different, so we had no apples to apples comparisons of which OS was more efficient or whatever else. During initial migration, BEAM support of kqueue was much better than epoll, but that got worked out, and I feel like Linux's memory usage reporting is worse than FreeBSD's, but it's a weakness of both. I was never comfortable in the FB server environment, so I left in late 2019, when the FreeBSD server count was reduced to a small enough number that I ran out of things to do.
[1] Much of the server team had experience with acquisitions at Yahoo! and the difficulties of making an operations team focused on one OS support acquired teams on another OS. With the many other technical and policy differences between WA and FB, eliminating the OS difference was an easy choice to reduce friction. Our host count, which was large at SoftLayer, was small at Facebook, even after factoring in increased numbers because the servers were smaller and the operations less stable.
What are the most popular markets for the BSDs today? Anything outside of research/edu?