RE: Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD?

> In parallel is the discussion why so little people are using FreeBSD.
> 
> Do you understand what I want to say?
> 
> Erich


I would say there are 3 main things.

1) the 3rd party apps, which has already been covered of how overpowering it
can appear to newbies. Not going into depth anymore

2) lack of advertising the name. If you ask most IT professionals to name as
many OSes as they can that they hear about, usually boils down to Windows,
Linux, Solaris, AIX,OSX and then the oddball IBM ones like Z, I, etc. not
many people hear about FreeBSD or what systems they use on a regular basis
that are based on it.

>From my understanding Hotmail was originally a BSD based system before they
were gobbled by Microsoft. Most newer websites are either IIS or a LAMP
stack as far as people know. The one new addition to the list of systems
that uses FreeBSD is Netflix as they advertise that is what their
OpenConnect system runs on (FreeBSD 9.0)
https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/software

In general though there is not the huge "My system is so stable because it's
based on (Free)BSD" out in the wild. The "in the know" techs know about it
but not Joe CIO at XYZ company

3) Most of the support for FreeBSD is provided by the community and a couple
of shops that cater to it like iX. There is not the same level of direct
support as the Linux community has (ie, RedHat, Novell, Canonical, etc) and
I believe a lot of people perceive that as the system not mature enough to
be used beyond a hobbyist OS. There are some extremely biased places out
there that, if the maintenance isn't 4-5 figures  a year, it's not
enterprise level support. This scenarios is not something that can really be
fixed unless the community became for-profit like most higher end Linux
distros did, which I think is also not necessarily the best of ideas. I can
see iX getting away with it if they did a spin of PC-BSD that was pretty
much geared at servers only , and not desktops, kind of like how CentOS is
for servers and Fedora is for Desktops (you can do reverse rolls, but why
would you?)