Nature of BSD operating system providers

sidetone

sidetone

BSD's with nonprofitsStartedLocationFoundation; started
NetBSD1993US: Wilmington, DE1994
FreeBSD1993US: Boulder, CO2001
OpenBSD1995CA: Calgary, ABCA: Edmonton, AB; 2007
HardenedBSD2014US: Boulder, COUS: Oakland, MD; 2018

BSD's as projectsLocationYearNotes
DragonFlyBSDUS; likely San Fransisco, CA2003forked from FreeBSD
FuguIta (Fugu-Ita)JP; likely Echigo2005OpenBSD based live CD
MidnightBSDUS; likely MI2007desktop, FreeBSD based
GhostBSDCA; likely Winnipeg, MB2010desktop, FreeBSD based
ZrouterEurope2010Router for ARM64
XigmaNASNL2012; 2018off FreeNAS, started in 2005
ClonOSRU≈2016server, FreeBSD based
NomadBSDDE2018desktop, live USB, FreeBSD based
FortranBSDCA; Richmond, BC2025forked from DragonFlyBSD

Enterprise BSD's which offer Opensource versionsLocationMisc
DynFiFR; Paris;
2001		Owned by DynFi
pfSenseUS; Austin, TX;
2004-2006		forked from m0n0wall; owned by Netgate
BSD Router Project (BSDRP)FR; Nantes;
2009		FreeBSD based; GNU utilities
OPNsenseNL; Middelharnis;
2015		forked from pfSense
From this, we can picture where on the globe BSD operating systems are based in. The BSD's with nonprofit organizations have benefits over other BSD's. I'm surprised a few BSD projects haven't incorporated into nonprofit foundations. As for enterprise BSD's, it's generous that they offer opensource products. Though we see how TrueNAS switched to being a Linux distribution as a business decision. Many of these won't necessarily do that, because BSD for a router/firewall is superior to Linux for those purposes. They could also be forked more readily if that were a concern, since routers/firewalls are lighter weight than NAS operating systems. m0n0wall wasn't an enterprise BSD, and while it's defunct, it can still be used.

Honorable mentions
  • Hyperbola GNU/Linux - due to it being converted into HyperbolaBSD. It's based off of Arch Linux, which is BSD like in a few ways. The GNU/Linux version launched in 2017. It originated in Porto Alegre, Brazil at the Forum Internacional Software Livre hosted by Associacao SoftwareLivre.org (Free Software Association). It hasn't yet transitioned to be a BSD OS. Hyperbola GNU/Linux is interesting as it uses OpenBSD's Xenocara. Its forums are @ https://forums.hyperbola.info/
  • TrueNAS - which I no longer consider truly BSD.
  • m0n0wall - although it's defunct, it's still available and many other BSD operating systems were based on it. Defunct FreeNAS was based on it. XigmaNAS is based on it. pfSense and OPNsense are also based on m0n0wall. m0n0wall was based on FreeBSD.
Official journals & blogs
Projects by foundation aside from journals, blogs and OS
  • by FreeBSD Foundation - FreeBSD Documentation Project; a handful of modernization projects
  • by OpenBSD Foundation - Xenocara; PF; OpenSSH; OpenNTPD; OpenSMTPD; LibreSSL; mandoc; rpki-client
  • by NetBSD Foundation - own downstream Xorg implementation which builds on own BSD build system; improved BSD make build system; hardware drivers not available yet on other BSD's
  • by HardenedBSD Foundation - hardening utilities, has tools which were once developed on FreeBSD
Forums used
  • FreeBSD - forums.freebsd.org
  • GhostBSD - forums.ghostbsd.org
  • NomadBSD - forum.nomadbsd.org
  • OPNsense - forum. opnsense.org
  • XigmaNAS - xigmanas.com/forums
  • DynFi - dynfi.com/forum
  • pfSense - forum.netgate.com
  • FuguIta - https://fuguita.org/?FuguIta/BBS
  • overall - UnitedBSD, DaemonForums
    • there was another BSD forum, which I forgot its name, and can't find it
https://www.bsdforen.de/ in German, makes me wonder about global reach of BSD's for the non-English speaking world. https://forum.netbsd.se/ and pkgsrc.se are Swedish variant sites for NetBSD.
 
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BSD: Conventions/Conferences, Summits, Hackathons
Conferences have often started out as city based user groups or by those who are familiar in the BSD ecosystem.

A resource on BSD conventions: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Conferences.

For upcoming opensource software events: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/events/. For past opensource software events: https://freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/event-calendar/.

Also, https://www.freebsd.org/events/, https://www.openbsd.org/events.html, https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/events.html, and https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/.

Hackathons
There are also FreeBSD Hackathons, which are smaller events than Summits. These occur on irregular schedules and in various places. A past FreeBSD Hackathon Event from 2023 in The FreeBSD Journal: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-w...ition/freebsd-14-0/hackathon-oslo-in-october/.

OpenBSD has its own hackathons, ever since 1999: https://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html. NetBSD had hackathons from over a decade ago, though not sure of their current status. There were even past PkgSrc hackathons which may have been organized by the Swedish NetBSD community. HardenedBSD has participated in a collaborative Hackathon with FreeBSD.

Regularly occurring BSD Conferences based on location
Developer & Vendor Summits
  • DevSummit BSD offers varying BSD conventions yearly. These often overlap with AsiaBSDCon, BSDCan and EuroBSDCon. They can occur before or after these other conventions. A few have been virtual summits. Some events are independently organized.
Past regularly occurring Conferences
  • NYCBSDCon was a convention at Columbia University held on odd years, which no longer occur.
  • vBSDCon was one held in Dulles Virginia near Washington D.C.
  • meetBSD was one held in Poland, between Krakow and Warsaw.
  • meetBSD California was once held every two years in a different location within the Silicon Valley region (Sacramento, San Fransisco) California.
  • ruBSD was once held in Moscow.
  • Kyivbsd was one once held in Kiev/Kyiv.
Conventions & Hackathons hosted outside of BSD's
FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting) and SCaLE 22X (Southern California Linux Expo) are two yearly held events not specific to BSD. SCaLE 22X is a part of Linux Fest, which has other convention subsidaries. FreeBSD has had an exhibition at All Things Open, as well. This post doesn't include other opensource conferences which may include room for BSD, because that may become extensive. You can mention them, if they have BSD activities, but they may be too much for me to list.

For a few hackathons outside of BSD, see: https://github.com/amahjoor/Hackathons.
 
Does anybody really get much of anything out of these?

Many years ago, I went to one held in my town and, while informative, I didn't get anything out of it than I could have just reading about the product online. I just can't see traveling far away to go to one.
 
HyperbolaBSD will be forked off of OpenBSD. Code not compatible and not convenient with GPLv3 will be replaced with code that will be compatible: that's not clear whether that will be a simplified BSD license or GPLv3. Code with the BSD license which had an advertising clause, code not expressly marked with a license, and driver blobs, for instance, are being rewritten. CDDL code will be rewritten or replaced, such as DragonFlyBSD's Hammer file system will be forked to be used instead of ZFS. HyperbolaBSD is also removing GPLv2 code. The project also wanted to get away from Pulse Audio and SystemD, and some directions that the Linux Kernel was going. HyperbolaBSD is also looking to start its foundation. It will used a fork of OpenRC init

It's also interesting how the Hyperbola project was working on Mozilla Firefox using a customized version of IceWeasel, which became a fork after differences in directions.

Their idea is to keep code they've contributed in the open source world forever, instead of giving it a permissive license which additions can be closed off to opensource. I believe that GPL also closes off code in different way, from other opensource. They may have changed their mind from using a simplified BSD license to GPLv3.

Previous thread announcements: Thread announcing-hyperbolabsd-roadmap.73640 & Thread hyperbola-gnu-linux-changing-to-bsd.73481. Forum blog announcements of bsdnow podcasts: Thread bsd-now-episode-332-the-bsd-hyperbole.73798 & Thread bsd-now-episode-335-freebsd-down-under.73967.
 
According to https://www.bsd.org/, the names BSD and UNIX are trademarked.

BSD Wikis
Some wikis are for direction within their respective projects more so than user wikis. They're all wikis, nonetheless. If you find more in different languages, please post them. https://archiveos.org/bsd/ gets honorable mention, as it's like a wiki, and it contains defunct operating systems: in this case BSD's and interestingly, in another category, some based off of FreeDOS.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Does anybody really get much of anything out of these?

Many years ago, I went to one held in my town and, while informative, I didn't get anything out of it than I could have just reading about the product online. I just can't see traveling far away to go to one.
Click to expand...

The 3 yearly BSD conferences are actually a traveling foodie club with a side hustle in making an OS.

It's all about the people and the food.
 
cracauer@ said:
The 3 yearly BSD conferences are actually a traveling foodie club with a side hustle in making an OS.

It's all about the people and the food.
Click to expand...
I’m only sorry that I didn’t go to the EuroBSDcon 2016, it was right on my doorstep, but my multiple sclerosis relapsed quite badly just few days before event, so I missed the chance to meet in person all the wonderful BSD people 😤
 
kent_dorfman766 said:
is the list non-profit focused? I didn't see BSDi mentioned in there..
Click to expand...
It's on opensource BSD. Ones with non-profits were compared to ones as projects and opensource BSD's with commercial BSD offerings. These are all typical BSD distributions, which I had in mind. These are included and the structure was categorized for comparison. HyperbolaBSD may lean towards GPL3, so it's not a typical BSD in that sense. Could get mentioned as being one of its kind.

There's also the case of Mozilla Foundation, that it has an associated for profit, while the foundation offers software and software stewardship for genuine opensource.

I didn't find information on BSDi, but ...
vmisev said:
AFAIK, BSDi merged with Walnut Creek CDROM in 2000, and then sold software part to to Wind River Systems in 2001 and renamed themselves into iXsystems, so IMHO they did okay as business.
Click to expand...
Perhaps BSD's still active.

Opensource BSD's with Commercial/Enterprise behind them are included. A few were listed from the beginning. BSD's were compared between: those as projects, those with their own backing foundations, and those backed by their own Commercial/Enterprise offerings.

iXsystems offering of TrueNAS was mentioned to give insight into that. TrueNAS isn't really BSD anymore, as that's being convoluted with Linux now, and their BSD offering is shelved.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Does anybody really get much of anything out of these?

Many years ago, I went to one held in my town and, while informative, I didn't get anything out of it than I could have just reading about the product online. I just can't see traveling far away to go to one.
Click to expand...
cracauer@ said:
The 3 yearly BSD conferences are actually a traveling foodie club with a side hustle in making an OS.

It's all about the people and the food.
Click to expand...
That's good for discussion. As long as the materials are made available online.

I looked up about BSD presentations on FOSDEM, in my eyes, it looks like they waited a year for two back to back 1.5 hour presentations on BSD. I can imagine how much would be missed in 5 minutes, perhaps don't let anyone in late to those presentations.Other BSD conventions from looking online seemed better, as in had more to offer. Maybe BSD conventions are better for developers and such. There's good online information coming from past BSD conventions.

It seems more is given back to the opensource/BSD community than is received by those hosting those conferences. Especially to those who use the benefits from it, like the improved software or who get to view videos and documentation of it online. Compare to anything else.

Perhaps more was achieved for OS's through hackathons. OpenBSD claimed to have the first Hackathon which was in Calgary, Theo's home city, not previously mentioned, except included in a reference above.

Do Linux Fests have more for users to gain from than BSD conventions?

vmisev said:
I didn’t go to the EuroBSDcon 2016, it was right on my doorstep,
Click to expand...
At least you were following BSD then. And are still in the online community. It won't be the only open source event.
 
Apache Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation & Eclipse Foundation: events/conferences
Apache Software Foundation events, Mozilla Foundation events and Eclipse Foundation events are here, due to that they steward non-viral licenses, which can be used without changing license terms of programs used alongside with them. These are here for the purpose of having a greater software library, including in userland. These aren't OS providers. A lot in previous posts weren't either: they were supplemental to the BSD software ecosystem.

Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a steward with one of the most software under its licenses. Academic Free License 3.0 by Rosen Law is considered redundant with this license.

Even though Mozilla has an associated for-profit, there's less conflict of interest for opensource offerings by Mozilla allowed due to its foundation. Oddly, the Mozilla for-profit is owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla Foundation stewards a license used by a significant amount of code.

Eclipse Foundation also has its own events.

Apache Software Foundation events
Apache Software Foundation (ASF) hosts ApacheCon.
ASF has a few projects which have conferences.
Apache Kafka is a streaming platform for data and other applications used by companies. https://kafka.apache.org/events

Apache Ignite, a database program hosts its own conferences too: https://ignite.apache.org/events.html. Iceberg Summit is another conference co-hosted by the Apache Software Foundation for Apache Ignite: https://www.dremio.com/press-releas...mmit-2025-in-person-virtual-bigger-than-ever/.

Ignite Summit is another conference for use of Iceberg Ignite and other databases, though it's not hosted by ASF: https://ignite-summit.org/.

Compare ignite conferences to PGCon (PostgreSQL Convention).

Mozilla Foundation events
Mozilla Foundation hosts the Mozilla Festival conference and other events.
Eclipse events
The Eclipse Foundation hosts EclipseCon. Open Community Experience (OCX) is the flagship annual conference by Eclipse foundation.
 
I think that will interesting to watch what will happen with FortranBSD by Mohamad Badiezadegan (mbzadegan).
Quote: “FortranBSD, a new operating system designed specifically for Fortran developers who demand high-performance and seamless multithreading support. FortranBSD is based on DragonflyBSD which is an outstanding OS for HPC application” /q
It will be very interesting to watch it when/if DragonflyBSD gets better LLVM support, and LLVM Flang gets production ready status (Flang is an open-source Fortran compiler based on the NVIDIA/PGI commercial compiler).
Boffins gonna make those supercomputers full of Nvidia cards go brrr on BSD 😎
 
The creator of FortranBSD has a book/booklet of tuning FreeBSD for performance.
I've also mentioned it on these forums under a thread about a small list of free ebooks for computer science.

FortranBSD is a small project. more likely will follow DragonFlyBSD, with few changes like putting Fortran in the core and having kernel customizations for math. It uses GCC.

DragonFlyBSD also uses GCC. It's time for them to use LLVM, that FreeBSD already replaced most of GCC components from its system.
 
sidetone said:
The creator of FortranBSD has a book/booklet of tuning FreeBSD for performance.
I've also mentioned it on these forums under a thread about a small list of free ebooks for computer science.

FortranBSD is a small project. more likely will follow DragonFlyBSD, with few changes like putting Fortran in the core and having kernel customizations for math. It uses GCC.

DragonFlyBSD also uses GCC. It's time for them to use LLVM, that FreeBSD already replaced most of GCC components from its system.
Click to expand...
DragonflyBSD is also small project – 58 Committers and 12 Additional contributors with most of the code written by Matt Dillon. That’s why I said:
vmisev said:
It will be very interesting to watch it when/if DragonflyBSD gets better LLVM support, and LLVM Flang gets production ready status
Click to expand...
GFortran is only logical choice for now, because even if DragonflyBSD had good LLVM support, Flang is not production ready yet.
It's only that I "sniff" great potential there, and my hunches are usually right 😎
 
I got that. It was more vague expressed that way. I was saying, it's time for them to use LLVM. Fortran needs GCC though, so that was addressed.

I'd like it evolve into MathBSD.


Pictures of June 2025 FreeBSD Hackathon in Kitchner-Waterloo area Ontario.
https://people.freebsd.org/~emaste/hackathon202506/. This is mentioned from https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2025-04-2025-06/#_hackathon_202506_kitchener_waterloo_canada


Also, NetBSD has an annual virtual meeting on IRC: https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/agm2025.


About software by Eclipse Foundation, relating to its community events. Eclipse's offerings are mostly for Java, and other code under its stewarded license is opensource offerings by IBM. Eclipse started off as an IBM project. It later became its own foundation incorporated in Europe, independent of IBM which is based in the US. There's another part to their history, later on, IBM and Eclipse Foundation agreed on cooperating to allow the EPL license to supersede CPL. This is why there are additional EPL offerings which are not Java based. Postfix is one offering from IBM.

Updates to first list:
  • MidnightBSD is likely based in Michigan.
  • Zrouter is a BSD OS which is available for ARM64: https://zrouter.org. it was started in 2010.
  • BSD Router Project is a company, not a project. It's likely based in Nantes, France. https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/The-BSD-Router-Project.pdf
  • DynFi is owned by a company of the same name. It's from Paris, France, started on 2001.
  • OPNsense is from Middelharnis, NL. It's owned by Deciso. It was a fork of pfSense.
  • pfSense is owned by Netgate, and is from Austin, TX; US. This OS used to be from Kentucky. It was a fork of m0n0wall.
(Will keep this here, and reflect many changes.)
 
vmisev said:
FortranBSD is based on DragonflyBSD which is an outstanding OS for HPC application
Click to expand...
(I know this is a quote from someone else)

If DragonflyBSD is "an outstanding OS for HPC applications", how does one explain that 100% of the largest 500 HPC machines in the world run Linux, and 0% run either FreeBSD or DragonflyBSD?

By the way, a lot of the machines on the TOP500 list do run Fortran codes; it is still a popular programming language in simulation and science, which is what a lot of the TOP500 is used for.

My hunch: The statement "DragonflyBSD is an outstanding OS for HPC applications" is complete nonsense, and based on wishful thinking.
 
ralphbsz said:
(I know this is a quote from someone else)

If DragonflyBSD is "an outstanding OS for HPC applications", how does one explain that 100% of the largest 500 HPC machines in the world run Linux, and 0% run either FreeBSD or DragonflyBSD?

By the way, a lot of the machines on the TOP500 list do run Fortran codes; it is still a popular programming language in simulation and science, which is what a lot of the TOP500 is used for.

My hunch: The statement "DragonflyBSD is an outstanding OS for HPC applications" is complete nonsense, and based on wishful thinking.
Click to expand...
Well, the guy that wrote this quote is Mohamad Badiezadegan, who also has Master’s Degree in Applied Mathematics (Cryptography) and wrote a book “FreeBSD customization for High-Performance Computing(HPC) / Unleashing HPC Power on FreeBSD” so I recon that he knows a thing or two about Math, HPC and BSDs

Also, Linux and Windows absolutely dominate in Server OS market share, IDK then why we are losing our time with BSDs here? /s 🙃
 
vmisev said:
so I recon that he knows a thing or two about Math, HPC and BSDs
Click to expand...
Yet, there are very few people who use BSDs for HPC.

vmisev said:
Also, Linux and Windows absolutely dominate in Server OS market share, IDK then why we are losing our time with BSDs here? /s 🙃
Click to expand...
Because FreeBSD is a better system, for some use cases. Like the machine that is literally 9 feet underneath me (I'm sitting in the living room, and the house server is in the basement).
 
rbranco said:
Why? GCC is faster and less buggy than Clang.
Click to expand...
Can you point to some benchmarks comparison, please?

Also, what we talked about here (please see few posts up) is that LLVM is needed for Flang, and Flang is based on the NVIDIA/PGI commercial compiler, which is important for HPC environments.
 
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