Popular products based on BSD

There are many open source as well as commercial products based on BSD, due to its technical prowess and permissive licensing. Popular open source products include NAS distros like FreeNAS and NAS4Free and firewall projects such as the embedded m0n0wall distro and its fork for regular computers, pfsense.

Then there’s the open source Darwin project by Apple, which produces the core components upon which the company’s proprietary OSes, OS X and iOS, are based. Darwin uses code that’s derived from BSD, which is also used as the basis for the file systems and networking facilities of OS X.

There are other commercial products based on BSD by multinational hardware and software companies, such as Dell’s iSCSI SAN arrays. Silicon Graphics International also uses FreeBSD in their ArcFiniti MAID (standing for Massive Array of Idle Drives) disk arrays and so does Sony in its best-selling PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles, and PlayStation Vita handheld gaming device.

FreeBSD is the most popular of the BSDs and powers both open source and proprietary products. Juniper Network’s JUNOS is based on FreeBSD which is also used in the Netflix Open Connect appliance. FreeBSD also powers the popular messaging app, WhatsApp and post its multi-billion dollar acquisition its founder and long-time FreeBSD user donated $1 million to the open source project.