Free BSD

September 2nd, 2005

FreeBSD is a free, open source, Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through 386BSD and 4.4BSD. It runs on processors compatible with the Intel x86 family, as well as on the DEC Alpha, the UltraSPARC processors by Sun Microsystems, the Itanium (IA-64) and AMD64 processors. Support for the PowerPC and ARM architectures is in development.

FreeBSD is developed together as an entire operating system. The kernel, all of the expected userland utilities such as the shell and the device drivers are held in the same source code revision tracking tree (CVS). This is in contrast to Linux, a similar and more well known free Unix-clone, which is developed as a kernel by one group, userland utilities by others such as the GNU project, and put together with applications into distributions that package all the parts together by others. As an operating system, FreeBSD is generally regarded as being quite reliable and robust, and of the operating systems that accurately report uptime remotely
FreeBSD is the only free operating system listed in Netcraft’s list of the 50 web servers with longest uptime. However long uptime also indicates that no kernel security fixes are installed, as installing a new kernel requires a reboot and resets the uptime counter of the system.

License

FreeBSD is released under the BSD License, which allows everyone to use and redistribute FreeBSD as they wish, as long as they do not remove the copyright notice and the BSD license itself — which does not prohibit re-distribution under another license. There are also some parts under the GPL or the LGPL, such as gcc and gzip.

Entry Filed under: Free BSD