Summary: A leading force in the BSD world, FreeBSD, is celebrating an important anniversary

"FreeBSD was released 1 Nov, 20 years ago," writes iophk, "if Wikipedia is accurate."

Here in Techrights we generally support FreeBSD, whose 10th version (as in 10.0) is almost ready [1]. Like PC-BSD 9.2, whose reviews are improving [2], FreeBSD is mature enough for people to use on the desktop (as colleagues of mine do). FreeBSD contributed towards creation of proprietary operating systems like Mac OS X, which misuse the word "free" to simply mean gratis (no cost, except the hardware that's tied to it [3]). Therein lies some common opposition to the BSD licence, which is liberal to the extent that it allows companies to remove the liberty of downstream users. ⬆

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. FreeBSD 10.0 Beta 3 Released

   The latest beta release of FreeBSD 10.0 is now available for testing.
   
   FreeBSD 10.0 Beta 3 features many bug-fixes, a POWER hypervisor interpartition ethernet driver, an Altera Triple Speed Ethernet MegaCore driver, a "pkg bootstrap" command, and numerous other system-level changes.





2. PC-BSD 9.2: The daemon is in the details

   As to running PC-BSD, my experience had me constantly swinging back and forth between two thoughts: "Wow, this is a great feature, I wish more projects did this!" and "Drat, another bug, this is frustrating!" There was not a lot of middle ground between these two thoughts while running PC-BSD. It seems as though the developers tried to supply several new features for this release, all of them good ideas, but some of the implementations still have problems. Let's start with the system installer. This is a fine piece of software. I really like that the installer can detect our hardware and warn us if some hardware support is missing. I also like the various guided disk partitioning options and the optional package selection screen. Both of these features were well implemented and I had no issues at all with the installer.





3. Operating systems want to be free

   Two of the three major desktop operating systems are now free. And it's likely to be a trend