At NeoSmart Technologies, we don’t build just applications on top of the operating system – we build applications for the OS itself. Our Easy Recovery Essentials® line of bootable system repair CDs is used by thousands of end users, IT professionals, and system administrators around the world on a daily basis to detect and correct where possible issues with the users’ hardware, boot configuration, operating system, and applications in a safe, stable, and reliable manner.
Easy Recovery Essentials was purposely written in a mix of (mostly) cross-platform C/C++, a dusting of assembly, and an html user interface in order to allow us to evaluate different “host” platforms to boot and run our software on hundreds of thousands of different PCs — decades old and breaking-edge new — from all the various manufactures and OEMs. Unlike deploying an operating system on servers in a datacenter or in the cloud where the hardware is fully under your control, we actually needed something that would reliably run, GUI and all, on end-users’ hardware with minimal issues… a tall order.
After trialling both Windows® PE and various Linux distributions in production for several years, we found that only FreeBSD offered a rock-solid, open, well-architectured, and cohesive platform at the lowest level upon which we could reliably base our software and expect it to “just work” for almost all of our customers, everywhere, all the time. The logical and centralized-yet-modular codebase makes it easy to understand how the operating system works and to extend it with the functionality we need without breaking things, allowing us to focus on developing our product rather than resolving issues with the bootable host environment.
Last but not least, FreeBSD’s completely free, no-strings-attached licensing model let us incorporate and take advantage of FreeBSD as we saw fit without needing a team of lawyers to tell us whether or not we could use FreeBSD to do amazing things – and made it easy for us to simply contribute virtually all of our improvements, ports, integrations, and bugfixes right back to the community under the same, open license we obtained them under in the first place.
For us, sticking with and continuing to support FreeBSD is a no-brainer. We are proud to sponsor FreeBSD every year, and readily recommend it “hands down” when asked for our recommendation for a fast, battle-tested, and reliable platform.
– Mahmoud Al-Qudsi, NeoSmart Technologies
