FreeBSD is a more centralized and more methodically developed operating system. It shows in a few important aspects: just about everything in the core system has a high quality man page -- the most significant difference being the kernel drivers, which have near to no accessible documentation in Linux.
The kernel and the core user space are developed together, which leads to better compatibility between these two.
FreeBSD usually supports 1-2 old major releases, which is an obvious good thing for servers.
ZFS and jails. BSD license. Competition. The open source world will be a lot poorer if it will consist of only GNU and Linux.
If I may be a bit less serious, I feel that there's a competition between two philosophies of software projects in the OSS world: one is "lets hack lol" and the other one is a more methodological, thoughtful way. Examples: MySQL & Postgres; ruby & python; Linux & BSD. It seems obvious that neither way is absolutely superiour.
FreeBSD is a more centralized and more methodically developed operating system. It shows in a few important aspects: just about everything in the core system has a high quality man page -- the most significant difference being the kernel drivers, which have near to no accessible documentation in Linux.
The kernel and the core user space are developed together, which leads to better compatibility between these two. FreeBSD usually supports 1-2 old major releases, which is an obvious good thing for servers.
ZFS and jails. BSD license. Competition. The open source world will be a lot poorer if it will consist of only GNU and Linux.
If I may be a bit less serious, I feel that there's a competition between two philosophies of software projects in the OSS world: one is "lets hack lol" and the other one is a more methodological, thoughtful way. Examples: MySQL & Postgres; ruby & python; Linux & BSD. It seems obvious that neither way is absolutely superiour.