[makeitdouble]

That's also the period Yahoo and other companies had a tremendous investment in FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is great on its own, and that amount of attention also meant every single bit of performance would be extracted no matter what it takes, and any scaling or stability issues would be hammered out pretty quick.

Until they moved to redhat...

[znpy]

> Until they moved to redhat...

Does anybody know why they switched to RedHat ?

[tiffanyh]

This old thread has former Y! folks chiming in as to why.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558288

> I think the justifications were better support for running on Linux (storage drivers, Java, MySQL, oracle), better support for virtualization (although bsd jails are better than virtualization in my opinion, and a better fit for Y!), and it would be easier to support one os instead of two and acquisitions (including inktomi) really wanted to run on Linux.

[znpy]

Interesting, from that links i see some replies like this:

> Also, the FreeBSD license was more relaxed and commercial products (like NetAPP) could include and extend FreeBSD without disclosing their modifications.

and then (same comment):

> Our frustration with lack of support for FreeBSD moved us to choose Linux and Windows

I think these two things are strongly correlated: the bsd license allow companies to avoid contributing back improvements, and this prevents the main FreeBSD codebase from getting better.

I think that in the long run this is detrimental to projects.

[makeitdouble]

I always assumed money, but I'd love to know as well.