[ls612]

As a neophyte to the server/homelab world, why do people have such strong feelings about FreeBSD vs Linux? To me they seem to accomplish much the same things in much the same ways, although my only experience with a BSD like system is MacOS. Am I missing something crucial here?

[SpecialistK]

I would say the BSDs and Linux differ in two major ways (to a neophyte, at least):

1) is that BSDs use a monorepo - the kernel and userland are all developed by the same team in the same place, rather than GNU coreutils on top of the Linux kernel, packaged by a number of different distros.

So each of the 4 major BSDs (Free, Net, Dragonfly, and Open) are full operating systems with their own teams and priorities. They share code and history (Dragonfly is a fork of Free, Open is a fork of Net; all are derived from 4.4BSD in the early 90s) but have diverged into their own niches. GhostBSD, TrueNAS, opnSense, and GhostBSD are downstream "distros" of FreeBSD.

2) is the license: whereas Linux and GNU use the copyleft Gnu Public License, the BSDs use a permissive license. This means that BSD code can be used in proprietary software (including but not limited to Sony's Playstation OSes and Windows(!!) [ever wonder why the Windows HOSTS file is in such a weird location...?]) and merged into Linux. But GPL code cannot be added to BSD.

Copyleft vs permissive licensing is a bit of a religious disagreement in the FLOSS world.

[ls612]

OK at least the idea that it’s mostly sectarian disputes makes sense.

I do wonder though, if most Corps want as much leverage and rights for themselves, why did Linux largely “win” in the enterprise world.

[SpecialistK]

There's a few theories:

* the legal disputes with AT&T meant that Linux was an earlier Free and Open Source Unix-compatible and gained momentum

* the leadership of the respective BSDs are more conservative or "picky" with their merges, requiring sufficient documentation and cross-architecture support

* the BSDs are 4+ different projects rather than one upstream Linux kernel, making contributions harder

* permissive licenses mean that a company using BSD code does not have to announce or share their changes to customers, making BSD adoption harder to notice (unless you read all of the fine print)

[halJordan]

It's just two different ways to accomplish it. To pick a charged example purely for effect; this is akin to asking why do Republicans and Democrats have such strong feelings on governing the country? Most people are centrists and most people want similar means to get the same outcome for the country.