Why Did We Choose FreeBSD?

Index

Introduction
Why FreeBSD Rather than Linux?
Why FreeBSD Rather than Windows?

Introduction

There are many reasons why we chose to use FreeBSD vs. Linux or Windows for this workshop. The next few sections will give some of the reasoning, but here we touch upon the larger issue of why we chose FreeBSD over Linux at this time. The argument goes like this:

What are your reasonable "free" choices in the Linux world at this time?

Each of these choices has its own issues, the popular our opinion being that, Debian and Fedora Core are the best alternatives at this time in the Linux world.

Why Did we Choose FreeBSD Rather than Linux?

We are using FreeBSD 6.0. Here are some more specific features why it was chosen over Linux for use in an ISP environment:

A few more reasons...

Why Did we Choose FreeBSD Rather than Windows?

To be honest, all your instructors are not fans of Windows, particularly as an operating system in an ISP production environment. Most instructors have extensive experience with how Windows performs in the real world under heavy workloads (remember, as a server), and we are frankly not impressed. With that said, here are, hopefully, some more objective reasons why we use FreeBSD vs. Windows:

A few more reasons...

Open Source and "free" operating system costs money as well, but, at least you are paying for your time and energy. Very few independent studies have been done an what it costs to run Windows vs. Linux or Unix in a business. The few independent studies that have been done consistently show Windows to be more expensive to run.

Here are some additional links you can consider:

We could go on, but really this is an issue of experience. If you look around you'll see that the majority of Web servers and larger email servers are not running under Microsoft Windows, and there are many reasons for this.