Contributors

In addition to the committer team, FreeBSD has thousands of contributors. Contributors don't have to worry about breaking the main operating system repository; they just submit patches for consideration by committers. Committers evaluate submissions and decide what to accept and what to reject. A contributor who submits consistently acceptable code will frequently be asked by the committers he works with to become a committer himself.

For example, I spent several years as a contributor. Any time I feel that I've wasted my life, I can go look at the FreeBSD Web page and see where my work has been accepted by the committers and used by thousands of users. (It helps. Sort of.) Between submitting this book and getting it back from the editor, however, I had some spare time. I spent a while submitting patches to the FreeBSD FAQ. Eventually, some members of the FreeBSD Project approached me and asked me to become a committer. I initially refused, but finally allowed a few developers to persuade me.[2]

Users

Finally, FreeBSD has a mob of users, though it's impossible to realistically estimate their number. After all, you can download the whole of FreeBSD for free, and never register, upgrade, or mail to a mailing list.

Estimates are that somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the machines on the Internet are BSD−based. That's 5–10 percent of all the systems connected to the Internet, including the countless Windows systems sitting on office desks. If you remove those systems from the count and only count Internet servers, the percentage rises.

Since FreeBSD is by far the most popular open−source BSD, that's not an inconsiderable number of machines. And since one FreeBSD server can handle hundreds or thousands of Internet domains, a disproportionate number of sites uses FreeBSD compared to the number of servers.

[2]And some day I might forgive Will, Wilko, and Bruce for that. But I'll never let them live it down.

Other BSDs

FreeBSD is the most popular BSD, but it's not the only one. BSD 4.4−Lite spawned several different projects, each with its own focus and purpose.

NetBSD

NetBSD is similar to FreeBSD in many ways, and the teams share developers and code. NetBSD's main purpose is to provide an operating system that can be ported to any hardware platform.

As such, NetBSD runs on VAXes, PocketPC devices, and high−end Alpha servers, as well as the Compaq iPaq. It even runs on hardware that doesn't exist yet—as I write this, the AMD Sledgehammer is fully supported even though you can't get sample chips. Now that's portable.

The NetBSD code is specifically licensed to be freely reusable, just like the original BSD 4.4−Lite code it's based on.

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