FreeBSD 13.0 released

But for FreeBSD I sadly suspect that it will lead to an increase in the migration of users from FreeBSD to Linux. We're already seeing this with projects such as pfSense (moving to Linux for their next generation TNSR) and FreeNAS/TrueNAS (moving to Linux for TrueNAS Scale). In both cases, they are not dropping FreeBSD but future, higher performance, development will be on Linux. At some point, common sense suggests that supporting two OS platforms will no longer make sense and they will have to choose one over the other. Linux seems like likely to be the winner.

And there's the thing. Linux has the benefit of the network effect, both in terms of users and in terms of developer time. As times goes on, it becomes harder and hard for FreeBSD to keep up. (Things must be more complicated still for the other BSDs).

Of course (other than Netgate for pfSense and iXsystems in the case of TrueNAS) there are several big name users of FreeBSD, who repackage FreeBSD and use it for their own purposes. One would hope that these (very!) big name commercial users of FreeBSD will contribute back to FreeBSD to keep it up to date. Perhaps they do, but even if they are contributing back, their contributions seems likely to focus on usage in environments that are limited to their hardware interests, whereas FreeBSD clearly needs (looking at the comments above and at many other comments in general about FreeBSD) investment in it as a general purpose OS to keep up with Linux.

To be clear, I think that OS diversity is a very, very important thing. But the network effect of end users, developers, and businesses who base their hardware/software offerings on other operating systems, taking together, seems to mean that Linux is winning at the expense of the BSDs (mainly FreeBSD).

How can this be countered? Even Linux distributions to that shun SystemD are having a harder and harder time. Sameness is trumping diversity and innovation. This isn't healthy.