this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What advantages does it provide

ZFS, mostly. There are some smaller peripheral things (like much better manpages), but these days the big one is probably ZFS. Zero licensing conflicts allows it to be an integral part of the kernel.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE switched to the OpenZFS implementation[1]:

The ZFS implementation is now provided by OpenZFS. 9e5787d2284e (Sponsored by iXsystems)

So no big differences now, except for the licensing.

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes/

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you explain the differences between the license like I'm five?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Linux is licensed under the GPL, which is described as "copyleft." The GPL requires that if you want to use GPL code you need to license your modified code under the GPL.

FreeBSD is licensed under the BSD license, which is a permissive license. Basically as long as you stick the license statement in your documentation you can do whatever you want with BSD-licensed code. This is why commercial uses (like the Wii's OS) tend to be BSD-based rather than Linux-based.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

like better manpages

I want them now! I want the better manpages! Has someone decided to create inproved manpages for Linux? I think this could be a great idea for a project or an organisation. Manprove, the organisation to improve Unix manual pages.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Isn't this actually impossible because manpages are maintained by distros? And the benefit of freedbsd being everything is created by the same team? Aka FreeBSD being a complete distro and not just a kernel?