This just in, Anonymous Coward points to Godwin's Law when examining Tony Perkins's op-ed.

Data expands to fill the space available. It doesn't matter what the super fast super large digital thing is this year, at some point it will feel slow and old. Remember 10Mbit ethernet? That was TEN times as fast as 1Mbit!!!!!! It GIFs loaded instantly from your fileserver compared to waiting for them to load on dialup.

http://noetic.org/discussions/open/227/ ??

Which host OS are you using?

I'm curious as to whether or not SeaBIOS can be integrated into VirtualBox rather than using the watcom bios. This is the BIOS that is utilized by KVM/QEMU and therefore most OpenStack implementation that I've used have SeaBIOS.

I've never run into the problems that you're referring to. Are you using a current stable version?

Where is the grade for VirtualBox. As opposed to the others on the list, I would give them an A+ for their stewardship of VirtualBox so far. They have released regular updates and bugfixes. I have run into zero problems running Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows in VMs. The UI has gradually improved. The project is still open source, and they actually provide binaries for every major OS.

Yep. Article is incorrect about Netflix running its infrastructure on Linux. It is running it on FreeBSD.

I get you, but I use the SVN repo here and the ports search here for doing all that. Then I use either pkg or portmaster to install what I want. The other great thing is that pkgng the package manager is supported by puppet, chef, cfengine, ansible, and salt. So installing packages and keeping everything up-to-date across all the variety of servers in a datacenter is a snap.

http://www.apple.com/server/docs/MacOSX_Server_TO_300195.pdf

From the horses mouth: "The power and simplicity of Mac OS X Server are a reflection of Apple’s operating system strategy, one that favors open industry standards over proprietary technologies. It begins with a UNIX-based foundation with Mach 3, FreeBSD 4.8, and the latest advances from FreeBSD 5 at the core."

Also, why would Apple have hired the founder of FreeBSD, Jordan Hubbard?

You are absolutely right. The guy complaining about my statement is uninformed. If you run strings on command line utilities in older Mac OS X builds you will also see the comment string left by the code being checked into the FreeBSD CVS source tree. Those comments have the word "FreeBSD" and the revision of the code being checked in and the name of the FreeBSD developer that did the commit.

You may want to revisit. The base tools for package management can be frustrating for someone who is learning them. Fortunately there are some newer tools that are in regular use probably after your last time using FreeBSD. The utility portmaster is most likely what you're looking for. It is able to control the ports system and package management very very very well. It has no external dependencies (it's actually just a huge shell script).

In addition to portmaster, the base system's package management has been completely rewritten in pkgng. You will find that it takes many good cues from debian apt.

All of these are command line tools. If you're a GUI type and shy away from command line, BSD's are not for you (yet).

The original question was why care and where is serious stuff being done. Are you disagreeing that putting together one of the largest content delivery networks ever is serious?

Netflix is doing really interesting stuff on their FreeBSD systems.

If you want very specific answers to why: The BSD port system is a huge reason. The main OS is developed in a release cycle where stability and security are the main goal. Riding on top of this is the ports system which all other software packages are built from. If you don't like one of the compile time flags in some software package you just make that change you want the first time you build from ports. You then have a custom package that you can deploy to all your other instances. The ports system also has the benefit of being much much more up-to-date than any linux distro except for Arch and Gentoo. Arch uses a rolling release development model and strives for everything being up-to-date. Gentoo uses the BSD ports system idea for their package management system portage.

The basics of it are that you get the stability of a regular release cycle and your installed software is always the current stable version.

BT never hired him. They acquired a company that he founded and was still working for at the time of the acquisition.