Choosing an operating system for new technology can be crucial for the success of any project. Years down the road, this decision will continue to inform the speed and efficiency of development. But should you build the infrastructure yourself or rely on a proven system? When faced with this decision, many companies have chosen, and continue to choose, FreeBSD.
Few operating systems offer the immediate high performance and security of FreeBSD, areas where new technologies typically struggle. Having a stable and secure development platform reduces upfront costs and development time. The combination of stability, security, and high performance has led to the adoption of FreeBSD in a wide range of applications and industries. This is true for new startups and larger established companies such as Sony, Netflix, and Nintendo. FreeBSD continues to be a dependable ecosystem and an industry-leading platform.
↫ FreeBSD Foundation
A FreeBSD marketing document highlighting FreeBSD’s strengths is, of course, hardly a surprise, but considering it’s fighting what you could generously call an uphill battle against the dominance of Linux, it’s still interesting to see what, exactly, FreeBSD highlights as its strengths. It should come as no surprise that its licensing model – the simple BSD license – is mentioned first and foremost, since it’s a less cumbersome license to deal with than something like the GPL. It’s philosophical debate we won’t be concluding any time soon, but the point still stands.
FreeBSD also highlights that it’s apparently quite easy to upstream changes to FreeBSD, making sure that changes benefit everyone who uses FreeBSD. While I can’t vouch for this, it does seem reasonable to assume that it’s easier to deal with the integrated, one-stop-shop that is FreeBSD, compared to the hodge-podge of hundreds and thousands of groups whose software all together make up a Linux system.
Like I said, this is a marketing document so do keep that in mind, but I still found it interesting.