Stefano MarinelliWhy I love FreeBSD
A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.
Arcticulate@stefano I remember being in our city center’s library, sitting at the fiberoptic internet-connected Pentiums and PowerPC Macs, surfing the web with Netscape. I had this one guy sitting on my left who I had interesting “hacker mentality” conversations with. He was really obsessed with how good the BSD license was for someone who made their own software and he used a BSD operating system (I have a feeling it was FreeBSD).
@stefano He told me that the GPL was inferior, but to put this in context, we were teenagers in the late 1990s. We were looking for the big winner and the big loser, no nuance.
I love Linux as well as BSDs. In the past I have made experimental bare-metal installs of OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD for short bursts and I liked how different the OS administration was. I think it’s fantastic that there are two different UNIX-like OSes with their own philosophies coexisting.