Main negatives about BSDs: more fiddly, not necessarily as well performing as a stable well optimised Linux release (read RHEL/CentOS), some compatibility problems (usually due to crappy programming by Linux-heads), you might have to compile a load of stuff yourself.

The big wins are however: rock solid, wonderful documentation, entirely cohesive base system, small, big enterprise features (ZFS, mandatory access control, tracing frameworks, awesome network stack, security, ACL support and better hardware support.

When I say better hardware support, I mean the drivers all work rather better than their Linux counterparts rather than being plentiful and the supported platforms are plentiful and reliable.

I can drag a 17 year old SPARC64 machine out of the cupboard and just use it.

Not better performing?

Whatsapp had an interesting presentation @ Erlang Factory worth considering -- http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...

It depends on the workload. Linux seems to scale to higher workloads slightly smoother without masses of tuning.

Both DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD have improved their scalability on SMP systems over the past year or so. FreeBSD's improvements started in 9.1 and continued in 10; DragonFlyBSD claims to have eliminated nearly all lock contention within the kernel as of it's recent 3.6 release, and initial results look very promising.

Yeah I noticed that on 9.1. I tried it on one of our "monster" 48 core boxes and it was pretty good with some sysctl poking.

Waiting for 10 before serious evaluation starts when pkgng is default. That and freebsd-update pretty much nail it then for me.

This is a classic piece we generally give hackers new to FreeBSD: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/08

Something to consider, which I should point out because your new, is that without BSD you wouldn't have OSX. There's a little BSD in everything (even windows). Another worthy article you should definitely read which explains that BSD is the The single Greatest Piece of Software Ever, with the broadest impact on the world, was BSD

http://www.informationweek.com/whats-the-greatest-software-e...?

To all intents and purposes, FreeBSD is dead. If not yet dead, FreeBSD is a carcass whipped out by Apple and friends to say they "support" open-source.

OS X and others have leeched off BSD and made billions, yet every December, this year being the same, FreeBSD has to whip out the begging bowl to raise funding.

Yes, some large corporations employ some of the FreeBSD folk, but what would happen if they stopped employing them? Would FreeBSD be able to build a strong community of developers to accelerate development? I doubt it.

Linux is in a much healthier place and I attribute much of that to licensing as well as technical excellence. The GPL has helped foster an active community around Linux, one that does not allow corporate vultures to simply scavenge off the best bits and usurp direction of the project.

This entire statement seems rather disingenuous; to claim that Linux is not molded by corporate interests is questionable if not outright wrong (e.g. http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/publications...).

I think BSD lost momentum because of the AT&T litigation back in the early 1990s and that momentum helped and continues to help Linux achieve the success that it has.

It is possible to praise Linux without burying BSD.

The only piece of BSD in Windows I know of was the network stack up until Vista (when MS rewrote it completely). There's nothing left by now.

Not true: http://www.silug.org/lists/silug-discuss/200403/msg00165.htm...

I'm pretty sure the ftp.exe client program had some BSD bits at one time. There might have been some small things like that. Nothing big.

An intern could rewrite that over the weekend. What's your point?

I don't quite understand your question. ygra asserted that the Windows network stack was taken from BSD. This was never true and was kind of a pernicious rumor for a long time. I just assume Greg Lehey's word on it is enough for most people.

There were a few little odds and ends that popped up with BSD license notifications over the years, like the ftp client IIRC. As you say, little utilities that don't amount to much. What is YOUR point?

I believe the choice of BSD kernel of OS X was laregely due to the permissiveness of the BSD license v. GPL, not underlying kernel advantages.

Dragonfly is basically a glorious parallel universe in which the Amiga never died http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD

Pretty much. When I saw the early releases I was wondering iis that the Matt Dillon? And sure enough, it was.

All is clear now. Thanks for pointing this out :)

OS X uses portions of FreeBSD including the userland so if you're used to that you probably won't find too many gotchas when using FreeBSD in that regard. I've never touched a straight *BSD install to know the practical differences in configuration and maintenance vs OS X and Linux.

I occasionally get caught by a difference between the BSD and GNU userlands so I've often contemplated giving one of the BSDs a go rather than my typical OS X/Debian/Ubuntu Dev/prod web server preference.

if you look through their drivers, they use a sort of c++ without exceptions, but last i remember from debugging network drivers on osx, they looked like they were forked from freebsd a fairly long time ago, but were for a long time close enough to be able to see the roots(i don't know if it's still like that)

I think OS X uses NetBSD's userland.

It's a classic. I posted Chaos vs Order