Why FreeBSD Continues to Innovate and Thrive

The dynamic and disruptive technology industry has witnessed many shifts within its overall landscape, including changes that have forced long-term technologies to adapt and evolve.

FreeBSD is no different. Each new release demonstrates its commitment to continuous improvement and adaptation to meet the ever-changing requirements of current and future users across industries. What does that mean exactly? Let’s look at the most recent releases and what’s next.

With a focus on security, performance, and interoperability, FreeBSD 14 represents the culmination of both innovation and system enhancements. You’ll find iterative improvements like support for OpenSSL 3.0.12 and additional optimization for a serverless future. Want more? Check out the full review of 14.0.

The release of FreeBSD 13.3 reaffirms the Project’s commitment to stability and support. This recent update, which includes expanded hardware support and networking capabilities, demonstrates FreeBSD’s ability to provide a reliable foundation for mission-critical applications and services.

FreeBSD 15 is currently being developed with several anticipated improvements, including support for more than 256 CPU cores on AMD64, cloud-init, OCI, and OpenStack, further enhancing the platform’s capabilities and performance. As part of the ports collection, FreeBSD will also be supported as a Vector Packet Processor (VPP) development target in versions 13.x, 14.x, and 15.x. The FreeBSD Project has planned to hold the May 2024 FreeBSD Developer Summit in Ottawa, Canada, where further planning for version 15.0 will take place.

What’s going on in the development landscape is just part of what makes FreeBSD a thriving open source platform. It also has great impact across industries:

FreeBSD’s unwavering commitment to security, a priority for enterprises and organizations of all sizes, has been recognized by the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) through an award grant for the Alpha-Omega Project. Ongoing development efforts like the CheriBSD Project showcase FreeBSD’s adaptability and focus on advanced security architectures.

Netflix depends on the powerful networking capabilities of FreeBSD to stream movies, TV shows, and documentaries, including their own award-winning original content, to millions of users worldwide through its 400Gb/s Open Connect CDN, highlighting the exceptional performance and reliability of FreeBSD in high-demand environments.

Early-stage and scale-up ventures, including Metify, Nozomi Networks, RG Nets, and Zscaler, choose FreeBSD for its solid foundation, which reflects its appeal as a platform for innovation and growth.

NetApp leverages FreeBSD in its solutions, citing the platform’s stability for critical storage management. Similarly, Juniper Networks utilizes FreeBSD for Junos OS, highlighting its efficacy in high-performance networking equipment and underscoring FreeBSD’s strength and reliability in enterprise settings.

With FreeBSD as the chosen operating system for its gaming console, Sony PlayStation demonstrates the platform’s versatility and reliability. This decision speaks volumes about FreeBSD’s ability to meet the demanding requirements of gaming technology.

Whether it’s reliability, flexibility, or ease of integration, FreeBSD consistently delivers results that exceed expectations and drive the business forward. We encourage you to learn more about what companies and users say about FreeBSD.

Much of FreeBSD’s forward innovation momentum comes from companies contributing code back to the FreeBSD code base. Experience has shown that upstreaming changes allows for higher-quality code due to the rigorous upstream coding practices and thorough upstream review processes. It also reduces maintenance burdens by allowing companies to focus on core functionality without the need to address numerous changes in the underlying software later on. 

Finally, companies like Netflix have found that developing for the latest main version of FreeBSD, also known as FreeBSD-CURRENT, streamlines the development process, reducing technical debt and integration challenges. The above are just a few reasons why partnering with the Project to upstream your changes is valuable for your organization and the Project. 

The community is the most important aspect of FreeBSD’s continued advancement and innovation. From seasoned developers to curious enthusiasts, ample opportunities exist to contribute to its ongoing success.

Whether you’re mentoring, promoting FreeBSD, or participating in forums and mailing lists, your efforts drive innovation and growth of the Project. Support the FreeBSD Project today by joining our vibrant community and helping build our long-standing and growing open source ecosystem! Enhance FreeBSD by improving documentation, addressing bug reports, submitting code, and engaging in discussions. Every contribution, big or small, helps evolve FreeBSD into a more stable, secure, and performant open source operating system.