[skissane]

What was the motivation in choosing FreeBSD?

(Just so nobody misinterprets my question, nothing wrong with FreeBSD, I know other stuff also runs on it like Netflix’s CDN. Still always interested to hear why people choose the road less travelled)

[tlb]

RTM, PG and I used BSDI (a commercial distribution of 4.4BSD) at Viaweb (starting 1995) and migrated to FreeBSD when that became stable. RTM and I had hacked on BSD networking code in grad school, and it was far ahead of Linux at the time for handling heavy network activity and RAID disks. PG kept using FreeBSD for some early web experiments, and then YC's website, and then for HN.

FreeBSD is still an excellent choice for servers. You may prefer Linux for servers if you're more familiar with it from using it on your laptop. But you use Mac laptops, FreeBSD sysadmin will seem at least as comfortable as Linux.

[caslon]

Do you think this influenced early YC companies more generally? For example, reddit's choice in picking FreeBSD over Linux?

It's interesting that they might still be on Lisp if they hadn't picked FreeBSD (a chiefly cited concern was that spez's local dev environment couldn't actually run reddit, which seems like it wouldn't have been a problem with Linux, since Linux & OS X both had OpenMCL (now known as CCL) as a choice for threaded Lisp implementations at the time).

[tlb]

Lisp was indeed a hassle on FreeBSD. Viaweb used CLisp, which did clever things with the VM system and garbage collection that weren't quite portable (and CLisp's C code was all written in German for extra debugging fahrvergnügen.)

I don't know how Reddit came to use FreeBSD, but if you asked which OS to use around university CS departments in 2005 you'd get that answer pretty often.

[caslon]

Yeah, absolutely; wasn't criticizing the choice of FreeBSD more generally (short of elegant maybe, but the only real UNIX systems available these days are illumos and xv6, and they're short of elegant, too), just thought it odd for that specific use case.

Thanks for answering! That's really interesting about clisp; I've always found it a more comfortable interactive environment than any other Common Lisp, but it definitely sacrifices portability for comfort in more ways than one (lots of symbols out of the box that aren't in the HyperSpec or any other implementation, too, for example). I'm now really thankful I've never been tempted to look to its source!

[skissane]

> the only real UNIX systems available these days are illumos and xv6

I do wonder how you are defining "real UNIX system" in that statement.

[caslon]

How do you define UNIX? Don't use "a system licensed to use the trademark," as that's boring and includes many things that are definitely far from it. It's hard to pin down! I'd say it's easiest to define what isn't: massive systems.

Massive systems miss the design intent and, to a great extent, nearly every benefit of using UNIX over VAX.

This excludes many of the operating systems licensed to use the trademark "UNIX." In this regard, even though Plan 9 is obviously not UNIX, it's a lot closer to it than (any) Linux and FreeBSD.

[dang]

I don't know, because that decision dates back to pg and rtm and probably Viaweb days. We like it.

[ethbr0]

Pragmatic engineering: What will this change enable me to do that I cannot do now? Does being able to do that solve any of my major problems? (If no, spend time elsewhere)