In 1997, Ding Lei, who had just founded NetEase, noticed that a magical service appeared on the Internet: Hotmail.
Hotmail is different from previous email addresses in that it is free and can be accessed using a browser.
Ding Lei sensed the huge business opportunities in the future and prepared to borrow US$100,000 to buy it.
But Hotmail didn't want to sell it at all, so it offered a sky-high price that Ding Lei couldn't afford.
So Ding Lei decided to develop an email system by himself, and he chose FreeBSD as the server operating system.
Seven months later, the development of the e-mail system was completed. The first system was sold to Guangzhou Telecom for more than 1 million, and a free domain name: 163.net was given.
163.net became an instant hit, with more than 2,000 users registering every day and soon reaching 300,000 users.
Subsequently, Capital Online, Jinling Online, Shangdu Information Port, Guozhong.com, etc. were opened one after another. By selling email systems, NetEase had a profit of 4 million by the end of 1998.
Ding Lei made the first pot of gold in his life.
1
As a programmer, while lamenting Ding Lei's business vision, you may notice that Ding Lei chose a "strange" operating system, FreeBSD? Why not use Linux?
Because at that time, Linux had not yet formed a climate and had not yet proven its value in the server-side commercial field.
At that time, the dominant operating system on the PC side was definitely Windows, while on the server side, Unix took the lead.
Unlike Windows, Unix has many versions with the support of various IT giants.
Sun : Solaris
IBM : AIX
HP : HP-UX
SGI :IRIX
These Unix functions are powerful and deeply bound to the hardware of giants, occupying core positions in telecommunications, banking, securities and other fields.
Of course, the price of such a system is also very impressive.
FreeBSD is different. It is a free Unix operating system that provides complete TCP/IP network functions and can stably run www, email, ftp, NFS, Firewall, BBS and other services.
Simply put, FreeBSD can turn a cheap PC into an advanced and powerful network server.
Ding Lei wrote in "PC is Not Just a Cheap Workstation" that at that time more than 20 million users of Hotmail were running on more than 500 FreeBSD servers. Yahoo's 50 servers also use FreeBSD.
It can be seen that FreeBSD was the mainstay of Internet services in the late 1990s.
However, why did such a powerful and popular FreeBSD lose to Linux?
2
Ken Thomson brought the Unix fire to the University of California, Berkeley, and the genius Bill Joy took over and developed BSD.
(For details, see " Those God-like Programmers ")
In 1992, AT&T wielded the patent stick and sued the University of California. The Berkeley Computer Research Group had no choice but to completely abandon the source code of AT&T Unix and rewrite it from scratch.
Lynne Jolitz and William Jolitz, the couple, were keenly aware that the x86 architecture would surpass RISC and become the world's dominator in the future, so they transplanted BSD to the Intel 80386 microprocessor and created the famous 386BSD.
Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, said: " If 386BSD had been available before I created Linux, Linux might not have been born. "
Indeed, if 386BSD develops like this, Linux will have nothing to do with it.
The Jolitzes, like Linus, pay great attention to the code quality of the operating system, but they try to control quality by doing most of the work themselves. This somewhat elitist approach inevitably makes the development speed very slow and the release cycle even slower.
Some other contributors felt the potential neglect, and slowly differences arose, and 386BSD began to split, eventually forming three major branches: FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Among them, FreeBSD has developed the best and has the widest influence.
FreeBSD 1.0 was released in November 1993, and Linux 1.0 was released in March 1994. The two developed in tandem.
But the community cultures of FreeBSD and Linux are completely different.
In the Linux community, everyone can try various "weird" or "experimental" features to see which ones have real value, which attracts many developers.
The BSD community is relatively conservative and prefers to make existing technologies better than to try revolutionary new technologies. Therefore, FreeBSD is stable and powerful, and is loved by network administrators and system administrators.
Linux is like a programmer's playground, and programmers enjoy it here. As time goes by, there are more and more software packages on Linux, the number far exceeds FreeBSD, and the ecosystem is becoming more and more complete.
When it comes to product decision-making, FreeBSD adheres to a democratic system. If a dispute arises, a group elected every two years will resolve it. Collective leadership is good, but if consensus cannot be reached and decisions are not made, product development will inevitably be delayed. .
A very typical case is that in 2000, FreeBSD was discussing abandoning the ancient CVS and switching to a new version management system. Some people suggested using BitKeeper, while others suggested using Mercurial and Git. After eight years of discussion, the FreeBSD team could not make a decision. In 2008, Peter Wemm forced the use of Subversion, which ended the debate.
In comparison, Linus, a dictator, is much more domineering. He first used BitKeeper, but then he couldn't use it anymore, so he immediately developed Git himself and solved the problem quickly and with high efficiency.
Later, vendors like RedHat emerged in the Linux community, specializing in technical support for Linux distributions. In addition, IT giants such as IBM, Dell, HP, etc. directly support running Linux on servers, completely lifting the seal of Linux application in the commercial field. , countless small and medium-sized companies dare to use Linux!
In this way, the balance of victory slowly tipped towards Linux.
Not only FreeBSD, but also the powerful Microsoft, which has focused on suppressing Linux for 20 years, finally entered the embrace of Linux.
However, FreeBSD is not dead, and many IT companies (such as IBM, Nokia, Juniper Networks and NetApp) are using FreeBSD to build their products. The PlayStation and Nintendo Switch operating systems are also based on FreeBSD. Netflix, WhatsApp, and FlightAware also use FreeBSD extensively to provide external network services.
In particular, FreeBSD is an integral part of Darwin, which is the foundation of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
So, if you are using Apple products, you can pick it up and take a look, FreeBSD is among them.
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