The Report of My Death Was an Exaggeration

Let’s start with some numbers or, at least, numbers through the lens of Google. Start typing a search, and the suggestions that come up paint a picture. What’s that at position seven? So already we have Google planting ideas in our heads. Yet if we dig deeper…

…it’s pretty clear there is a steady trend up. Now I know what you’re thinking, “statistics are an optimistic truth!“, and it’s true, one can shape almost any story out of Google trends. I picked that time frame because when I looked at a wider timeline, Google pointed out there had been algorithm changes, meaning the results weren’t entirely comparable. This was about the most suitable time frame I could find post the last algorithm change.

In isolation that doesn’t really mean much, so let’s look at some contrast…

Searches for ‘Linux’ over the same time frame show interest is flat. Absolute numbers may be considerably different, but the trend shows a clear flatline for Linux and a gentle up trend for FreeBSD.

What’s going on then?

I have a hypothesis why people think FreeBSD is dying, and the startling conclusion alluded to in the introduction.

Recently, the infinitely wise YouTube algorithm put a quick interview with Cal Newport into my feed. I’ve read one of his books and listened to other interviews, so naturally my interest was piqued. In the clip, he talks about something he calls “pseudo-productivity” — basically, using factory-style measures of productivity for office or knowledge work. That leads to a lot of busywork, where people try to look productive instead of doing meaningful work. I believe the problem with FreeBSD is the mirror of this situation. Because it’s not talked about as much, people think it’s dying. This is a clear example of the availability heuristic.

That begs the obvious question then, why aren’t people talking about FreeBSD as much?

The startling conclusion

The availability heuristic is a fascinating mental shortcut. It’s how product names become verbs and household names. To ‘Google’ [search], to ‘Hoover’ [vacuum], to ‘Zoom’ [video meeting]. They reached a certain tipping point that there was no need to do any more thinking. One just googles, or zooms.

These days, building internet services doesn’t require much thought about the underlying systems. With containers and cloud platforms, development has moved far from the hardware. Operating systems aren’t top of mind — so people default to what’s familiar. And when they do think about the OS, it’s usually Linux.

But sitting there, quietly powering masses of the internet, without saying boo to a goose, is FreeBSD. And the companies using it? They’re not talking about it. Why? Because they don’t have to. The simple fact that dawned on me is FreeBSD’s gift to us all, yet Achilles heel to itself, is its license.

Unlike the GPL, which requires you to share derivative works, the BSD license doesn’t. You can take FreeBSD code, build on it, and never give anything back. This makes it a great foundation for products — but it also means there’s little reason for companies to return their contributions.

Let’s talk

Hardware support for FreeBSD can sometimes be trickier than Linux because vendors believe this fallacy. But we only have to look at the recent amazing work on Wi-Fi support to see how adopting Linux drivers is a viable solution.

So we’d like to appeal to companies using FreeBSD. Talk to us about your use case. Tell us if you’re struggling with hardware support. Even if your legal team doesn’t like the use being talked about publicly, we’d still like to hear from you. The conversations can stay between us 😀 But at least we’ll know where use cases are and where problems are. We, the FreeBSD Foundation, can be the glue between industry and software and hardware vendors alike.

In the meantime, stay tuned to this blog and the YouTube channel. We have some fantastic content coming up, featuring solutions built on top of FreeBSD and showcasing modern laptops for daily use.