Re:Awesome! (Score 1)

I don't know how much or how little companies contribute to FreeBSD, but it doesn't look like they throw much in. They are trying to raise $300,000 for the *year* (http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/). A company like Apple or Yahoo or Juniper or others that rely on it probably spend many times more than that on coffee. I hope that there is a lot I don't know about to help fund it (along with the other BSDs, Linux, and open source projects in general, for that matter), and there probably is, but being more public about it would be a nice change if that is the case. Quite a few companies have built themselves on top of BSD development--seems like they would want to see it continue to prosper.

I'm neither a developer or a rich guy, but FreeBSD and OpenBSD have saved my ass so many times I make sure to throw a few bucks their way every year. I do like Linux (particularly Gentoo and Ubuntu), and for bleeding edge things especially, Linux is awesome. But BSD is (for me) so simple, extremely stable, uber-easy to maintain, and crazy fast. For an average chump like me who needs a Unix platform to work and work well, BSD is very hard to beat. And PC-BSD has been very impressive to a lot of my Linux-user friends.

Insofar as BSD desktop deployments, no, I haven't really seen them and I doubt there are that many (besides the obvious of Apple ;-). But I would very much encourage looking into them. PC-BSD makes it very easy. I did three thin client deployments for schools in the area as a favor to my mother (she's a teacher) and it's been a godsend for them. We often used ancient hardware that was about to be thrown away and stood them up in one or two weekends (biggest one was 42 thin clients). No AV software required, centrally managed, lickety-splickety fast, and all the kids needed was a browser (Firefox), a video player (VLC) and basic documents (OpenOffice), so it was a perfect fit.

Probably the coolest part was showing the High School dorks how to maintain it and install apps (when I showed them how to update and compile a kernel, they acted like they were looking at The Matrix :-). So give it a try. Like I say to women: 'It won't take that long and, who knows? You just might like it.'