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-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from ZDNet Australia. --------------------------------------------------------------
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The other open-source OS: FreeBSD
October 13, 2000 URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/The-other-open-source-OS-FreeBSD-/0,139023165,120103223,00.htm
After jousting with windows NT and Solaris, Vijay Vaidyanathan last month threw down the gauntlet and declared that his company would no longer pay for brand-name operating systems. While the gesture was hardly original, colleagues of the CTO (chief technology officer) at online community Xoom.com Inc., in San Francisco, were surprised when he announced his choice in operating systems. Setting aside the Linux hype, Vaidyanathan decided to convert his remaining Solaris-based Web servers to run FreeBSD, the other open-source Unix variant. Linux may be the open-source operating system pegged as NT's newest competitor, but a growing contingent of developers and IT managers is running FreeBSD. The attraction? Scalability, reliability and its ability, as a Web server, 7to support enormous download volumes. That's attracted many ISPs (Internet service providers) and companies that run Web sites with heavy traffic to FreeBSD. Unfortunately for FreeBSD believers, however, the operating system still is not ready to challenge NT or even Linux as a mainstream platform for running business applications. Continuing to hold back FreeBSD from mainstream use are the same problems that, until recently, limited Linux: a lack of business software and database applications and spotty professional support. For Vaidyanathan and many other IT professionals, however, FreeBSD is a breath of fresh air because it is easy to administer and stable, particularly compared with alternatives such as Windows NT 4.0. Users have reported running FreeBSD for years without a problem--a far cry from the NT environment, where crashes and reboots can be daily occurrences. It is that stability that has helped FreeBSD draw supporters from companies such as Yahoo; Blue Mountain Arts; and software distributor Walnut Creek CDROM, which uses it to operate the largest FTP site in the world. "Our choice was obvious from the beginning, especially when it's fairly well-known that FreeBSD is kind of the only game in town when it comes to large, scalable kinds of servers," Vaidyanathan said. Along with using FreeBSD and the Apache Web server software to handle Xoom.com's online traffic, Vaidyanathan uses Linux to run his company's mail servers. Not only is FreeBSD stable, Vaidyanathan said, but it can also be easily modified. "Its benefit is that it does not take a genius to go into the source code and tweak it for our purposes," he said. "We could never do that with a brand-name OS. We would never have such access to the source code." FreeBSD has long been thought of as the choice for a low-cost, open operating system. Introduced in 1993, FreeBSD has borrowed heavily from the operating system developed in the 1970s at the University of California at Berkeley as the BSD (Berkeley System Distribution) strain of Unix. Like Linux, FreeBSD relies on independent engineers for its ongoing development. Changes in the kernel are approved by the FreeBSD Core Team, which is responsible for the direction and operation of the FreeBSD Project, assuming the role played by Linus Torvalds in the Linux world. Users customize the operating system and can post changes on the FreeBSD FTP site for others to consider. FreeBSD can be downloaded, free, from ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/freebsd or can be ordered on CD-ROM for US$39.95 from www.cdrom.com. The rise of Linux and open-source software generally has benefited FreeBSD. Bob Bruce, president of Walnut Creek CDROM, the distributor of FreeBSD, estimates that FreeBSD has one-fifth the users of Linux--about 1 million corporate and individual users worldwide. Why BSD?But, with the spotlight shining on Linux, why would some users buck industry trends to go with FreeBSD? IT managers using FreeBSD say it was a matter of timing--and money. When Phil Windley, CTO of the Web-based classified advertising site iMall went shopping for an operating system four years ago, Linux was not scalable and lacked the stability and robust networking of FreeBSD, Windley said. Although the new Linux 2.2 kernel has since begun to close the gap, he chose FreeBSD at the time. Cost was also an issue. From the beginning, Windley knew his company's applications would require lots of I/O bandwidth. But when he searched for an operating system that could provide lots of high-speed SCSI I/O, he learned that such a setup based on a commercial operating system would cost around US$30,000 per computer. Like the CTO of any startup, Windley needed a less-expensive alternative. For less than US$30,000, he built four FreeBSD-based servers that use fast SCSI I/O. The result: an implementation with much higher performance and a much lower price than systems using a commercial operating system or Linux. In fact, with its FreeBSD system, iMall has handled more than 1.5 million hits per day. "Linux wasn't ready for us at that point, and we heard the horror stories of running a large site on NT," Windley said. "In retrospect, FreeBSD was a natural for us." The need for flexibility and the power to support a high-volume electronic commerce site also attracted online greeting card vendor Blue Mountain Arts to FreeBSD. Jared Schutz, business development manager, said his company gravitated toward the open-source operating system after testing both Linux and NT. Blue Mountain runs its e-commerce site, where users can personalize free electronic greeting cards, on FreeBSD, which won out with its ability to handle high-volume Web server requests and HTTP traffic. While FreeBSD could handle 1,000 requests per second, Linux could handle only half that number--too few to meet Blue Mountain's needs. While economics and stability were reasons for choosing FreeBSD, both Windley and Schutz admit that they would never have gone with the operating system without the lead taken by Yahoo. The search engine portal, which started running FreeBSD 2.0.5 in 1995 on a single 100MHz Pentium box, now has more than 1,000 FreeBSD boxes running mission-critical applications such as the Yahoo Web site; Yahoo mail; and all of its games, chats and forums.
"The major factors behind FreeBSD were performance, cost and access to the source code," said Jan Koum, security and operations manager at Yahoo. "Our production is almost exclusively done on FreeBSD boxes." For hardware producers and VARs, FreeBSD also provides an advantage over Linux in its more flexible licensing agreement. Developers using FreeBSD can customise and rewrite any part of the operating system and sell it commercially as a proprietary product as long as they do not remove the license text from the source code. Linux's public license, on the other hand, requires that the standard Linux source be included along with any alterations that have been made. Whistle Communications is one company selling FreeBSD under the covers in its Whistle InterJet, an Internet access appliance. Doug Brent, vice president of engineering at Whistle, is also a supporter of FreeBSD and the open-source community. He runs the company's network and mail servers on FreeBSD and contributes, along with his engineers, to the FreeBSD project. "FreeBSD has strong networking support, and the licensing terms for a commercial vendor are more attractive than the licensing terms of Linux," Brent said. The downsideAs inspiring as such stories may be, they're not always enough to persuade risk-averse CIOs to take a gamble on FreeBSD. IT managers who are comfortable with mainstream technical support shy away from FreeBSD, which does not offer traditional technical support . Since the operating system is open-source and unlicensed, help is available through bulletin boards and the freebsd.org Web site. There are no commercial 24-hour phone-in support centers, however. That makes some IT managers nervous. There are other problems that can't be ignored: FreeBSD doesn't yet run on as many hardware platforms as Linux or commercial Unix; it's limited to Intel-based servers. And, more importantly, although FreeBSD will run a number of Linux applications through emulation, it lacks support from commercial database and application software vendors. Users are limited to writing their own applications or running freeware programs such as Apache. It's an obstacle Linux has recently begun to scale, but the lack of strong enterprise applications and a compelling GUI continues to hold back FreeBSD. Those shortcomings are starting to cost FreeBSD some of its early supporters. iMall's Windley, for example, recently exchanged his FreeBSD Web servers for Sun boxes running Solaris 2.6. Since many of the business applications Windley wanted to use were not ported to FreeBSD, he was already running Solaris on half of his servers. He decided to go with Solaris across the board in the interest of consistency and manageability. "A lot of the products we wanted to run, we just couldn't run on FreeBSD," Windley said. "We decided, from a systems administration standpoint, that we could run everything we wanted to on Solaris." Windley has not given up on FreeBSD, though. He continues to deploy the operating system in his mail servers and said he'll consider FreeBSD again if more applications are ported to it. Other corporate users have similar problems, Vaidyanathan said, adding that even software vendors willing to port applications to Linux still won't do so for FreeBSD. Until FreeBSD can offer more hardware and software support, it will continue to be limited to running Web servers at a few cost-conscious sites, experts said. But if supporters such as Vaidyanathan have anything to say about it, FreeBSD will have its turn in the limelight too. "The momentum is definitely behind Linux right now because it's the community's great darling," Vaidyanathan said. "But FreeBSD has its supporters too. Nobody's forgotten about it yet."
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Professional versions of FreeBSD can be ordered at Walnut Creek CDROM's Web site at