24 Facts About FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution, which was based on Research Unix.

In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular open-source BSD operating system, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed and permissively licensed BSD systems.

FreeBSD project includes a security team overseeing all software shipped in the base distribution.

FreeBSD later renamed itself to The FreeBSD Mall and later iXsystems.

Today, FreeBSD is used by many IT companies such as IBM, Nokia, Juniper Networks, and NetApp to build their products.

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FreeBSD contains a significant collection of server-related software in the base system and the ports collection, allowing FreeBSD to be configured and used as a mail server, web server, firewall, FTP server, DNS server and a router, among other applications.

FreeBSD provides two frameworks for data encryption: GBDE and Geli.

However, the FreeBSD project is still developing and improving its ZFS implementation via the OpenZFS project.

FreeBSD provides several security-related features including access-control lists, security event auditing, extended file system attributes, mandatory access controls (MAC) and fine-grained capabilities.

FreeBSD has been ported to a variety of instruction set architectures.

FreeBSD has a software repository of over 30, 000 applications that are developed by third parties.

FreeBSD has implemented a number of Microsoft Windows native NDIS kernel interfaces to allow FreeBSD to run Windows-only network drivers.

FreeBSD's kernel provides support for some essential tasks such as managing processes, communication, booting and filesystems.

The FreeBSD kernel has a scalable event notification interface, named kqueue.

Default FreeBSD shell is the tcsh shell for root, and the Almquist shell for regular users.

FreeBSD is developed by a volunteer team located around the world.

FreeBSD Project is run by around 500 committers or developers who have commit access to the master source code repositories and can develop, debug or enhance any part of the system.

FreeBSD developers maintain at least two branches of simultaneous development.

FreeBSD development is supported in part by the FreeBSD Foundation.

Many years FreeBSD's logo was the generic BSD Daemon, called Beastie, a distorted pronunciation of BSD.

However, it was announced by Robert Watson that the FreeBSD project is "seeking a new logo, but not a new mascot" and that the FreeBSD project would continue to use Beastie as its mascot.

Name "FreeBSD" was coined by David Greenman on 19 June 1993, other suggested names were "BSDFree86" and "Free86BSD".

FreeBSD's slogan, "The Power to Serve", is a trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.

The main difference to the original FreeBSD is that they come with pre-installed and pre-configured software for specific use cases.