Just curious, does FreeBSD read Linux code and OpenBSD code or even OpenSolaris and MeneutOS code? For inspiration? Ideas?
One has to be very careful with that, for reasons of intellectual property law. All code has some form of copyright. Most "open" software copyright clauses are complex.
If I were to (hypothetically) read code from operating system X, and then use it when implementing operating system Y, and the code I wrote for Y were very very similar to what I saw in X, then it would be pretty easy for people to claim that I de-facto copied code from X into Y. At that point, things can easily get very ugly. If system X has an "infectious" copyright (like the (L-) GPL, which is used for much of Linux), then people might be able to claim that Y has suddenly become a system derived from X and its source code needs to be published. Or the copyright owner of X might order me (or the people who own or maintain Y) to remove my changes. Or they might sue me for damages; and given that there are lots of companies that make lots of money with computers, the damage claims could easily be hundreds of millions of $. Just hiring my own attorney to defend myself against such claims would cost anywhere between $5K and $5M.
If you think this is a joke, look back at the history of operating system copyright lawsuits, including the BSD lawsuits, the USL system V lawsuits, the Linux and IBM lawsuits, and all that. I have been peripherally involved in some of these, and it is very expensive, very tedious, and disrupts progress. It gets particularly complex if some of the copyright involved is on closed source systems (like the original AT&T Unix, all commercial derivatives like HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, plus closed-source systems like VMWare, VxWorks, and Windows). All my employers (big computer companies) have had very clear and very strict policies about what needs to be done before inspecting source code.
For this reason, most professionals in this field are very careful about *not* reading the source code of competing products, except under very controlled circumstances. Typically, licenses and lawyers are involved in those cases. Now, obviously there is a lot of complexity in copyright law. For example, if I were to read the Linux source code *only* to find out which problem they are trying to solve (for example: draw a pixel on the screen without locking up the computer), without looking at *how* they solve that problem, and then I use that as inspiration for solving the same problem *in a different way of my own invention*, then I clearly have not broken copyright (or patent) law.
Just to give you a scale for why this matters: RedHat, whose only product is "Linux" and related services, is worth about $16B (that's billion), and has annual revenue of $2.5B. If they feel threatened by a few FreeBSD hobbyists reading their source code and copying it, they can easily invest a few million into a lawsuit.
www.cat-v.org for example recommends OpenBSD because its simpler, they go on about simplicity is the most important aspect.
Having been an OpenBSD user, I agree with them: OpenBSD is indeed simpler, cleaner, and better organized. But it also does a lot fewer things; one might argue that it does those things better. It can be a good choice for something where its capabilities match the requirements, and where its simplicity is a benefit. For example, if I had to set up a dedicated firewall/router machine, I would probably use OpenBSD. The moment I need interestingly complex storage service (with a modern file system with integrated RAID), OpenBSD no longer matches the requirements.
I just seem to achieve better performance on FreeBSD even when surfing the net ...
I find it unlikely that the performance of normal web surfing is determined by which OS you run. Normal web surfing gets its data at anywhere between 1 and 100 Mbit/second, and any operating system (even Windows) can render at that speed.
In general I read FreeBSD will run faultless for years on servers, is this just chrome/xorg lockup buggery?
Does FreeBSD have occasional bugs? Absolutely. Did you find one of them? Possible. It is also possible that your particular hardware (which in the case of display devices involves a lot of firmware) is broken. What is more likely is that the hardware is kind of working, kind of broken, that FreeBSD and its Xwindows component are kind of working, kind of broken, that IceWM stresses all these partially broken components in a particular way, and you found a corner case that people didn't anticipate.
