The History and Advantages of FreeBSD

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This chapter provides a historical background of the FreeBSD operating system, tracing its origins back to the original version of Unix in the 1970s. It discusses how the Berkeley System Distribution (BSD) was created at the University of California at Berkeley and became one of the pioneers of the open-source movement. The chapter also explores the challenges BSD faced, including lawsuits and competition from Linux, and explains the BSD license and its differences from the GPL. It concludes by mentioning that FreeBSD is used by people who have used real Unix for a long time, those who started with BSD in university, and companies that build products on top of BSD code.

This week we’re joined by FreeBSD & OpenZFS developer, Allan Jude, to learn all about FreeBSD. Allan gives us a brief history of BSD, tells us why it’s his operating system of choice, compares it to Linux, explains the various BSDs out there & answers every curious question we have about this powerful (yet underrepresented) Unix-based operating system.

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