"That's OK, rising tides raise all boats," says George Neville-Neil, whose work centers on networking in embedded systems. Neville-Neil was invited by Marshall Kirk McKusick, BSD pioneer, to co-author his new book, Design and Implementation  of the FreeBSD Operating System (Addison Wesley).

A bit of history: FreeBSD stems from a progenitor, BSD, which stands for Berkeley Software Distribution. As its name suggests, its roots are at the University of California, Berkeley, where work on BSD was in the form of a computer research project in the late 1970s. The goal of those working on BSD was a friendlier Unix.  NetBSD is the oldest BSD flavor, born in 1993, with FreeBSD soon on its heels. Two years later, NetBSD would fork to create OpenBSD.

FreeBSD is the most popular of the BSD variants today. Among its users are some very big names such as Yahoo. They applaud FreeBSD for  good performance as a network operating system; it has ports for major platforms such as Sun UltraSPARC, Alpha, and AMD64.

According to Netcraft, the UK company that provides Internet research and analysis, nearly 2.5 million active sites run FreeBSD. Its most secure foothold is with the hosting community, "FreeBSD has been synonymous with large-scale shared hosting," according to Netcraft, "since the genesis of the Web and continues a symbiotic relationship  with the largest hosting companies today." Netcraft credits much of FreeBSD's site growth to the continued growth of Yahoo's shared hosting offering. McKusick, explaining the success of FreeBSD in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, writes that "The combination of ease of installation and heavy promotion on the Net and at major trade shows led to a fast, steep growth curve."

Yahoo, which provides hosting for the project's servers, has well-publicized ties to the FreeBSD project; but they are not the only company with strong ties. The user community knows that a stronger FreeBSD directly depends on their support because, unlike Linux, there are no very deep vendor pockets speeding its growth. Of numerous donations reported by the FreeBSD organization, Pair Networks, an American-based Web hosting company, has given $20,000 to the community. Also among its list of donors is a generous German consultancy, Working Solutions GmbH (WKS). Many users tend to think of such donations as "giving back" to a community that helps them provide a secure and stable operating system as part of their services. One of the site messages at Pair Networks is a good example of the sentiment that prevails: