Thursday, September 11, 2008

FreeBSD, the Unknown Giant

My last entry about NetBeans and OpenOffice.org and their million messages reminded me that I've never announced here our load of the FreeBSD archives, an even larger and older community. They have more than 2.5 million messages, stretching back to 1994.

FreeBSD doesn't get as much attention at Linux but is a great operating system. Here's a description from an IBM developerWorks article:

"The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX®-like operating system mostly for the Intel® chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux®-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth."
Here's the historic traffic chart (excluding automated bug and check-in messages):


Looks like it's a giant in traffic as well. The freebsd-questions list alone gets a couple thousand emails a month, half a million in its history. Got a FreeBSD problem? I bet the answer's in there.

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