For those of you unaware, Colin Percival (author of the blog) was for many years the FreeBSD Security Officer and he's highly recognized in the field for his expertise.
He also runs http://www.tarsnap.com/ which is arguably the most secure (and cost effective) back up solution in the market.
(I'm in no way affiliated with Colin and/or Tarsnap. Just a fan of his work and humble attitude.)
But I think it's super funny and cool that you (yourself) are pointing it out.
All the best with you.
Edit: just read the "comeback of all time". That was really funny. Nice nod from PG as well. For those of you unaware like me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083 Colin is our resident mathematical genius :)
Thanks for linking that. It's always interesting to see posts from several years ago and reflect on how things turned out (if you go up a few parents you can see discussion about tarsnap and dropbox makes a brief appearance).
Colin, if you don't me asking (and this is extremely off topic), do you know of any resources to read up on the differences between FreeBSD and DragonflyBSD now 11 years after the split.
I'm not looking for you to take sides on the matter. I just enjoy reading history and would like to read a recent review of the two BSD now 11 years later and how they compare.
I've looked and looked for the past few months and can't seen to find a good solid length article on it ... which is why I ask.
DragonflyBSD is less mature. This allows them to play around with things in ways which we can't do in FreeBSD because we don't want to break production systems. In many ways DragonflyBSD acts as a skunkworks for FreeBSD -- we import a lot of cool stuff from there, once it has been proven to work.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want to run DragonflyBSD in production... because skunkworks projects often don't work.
1. The FreeBSD base system is developed intact, so there are far fewer kernel/library versioning issues.
2. FreeBSD, possibly because of its academic heritage, tends to take a more careful "let's study this problem and make sure we come up with the right solution" approach. This means that FreeBSD development is often slower, but once a feature is added it is more likely to actually work. (This is somewhat self-reinforcing: FreeBSD's stability attracts companies building servers and appliances, and when those companies contribute back they care a lot about having things continue to not break.)
3. Linux is far more popular, especially on desktops, so it tends to get drivers for new hardware faster (especially for consumer hardware).
4. FreeBSD is BSD licensed, which makes it available for a lot of companies which wouldn't want to get anywhere near Linux.
Thanks. That fits my general idea of FreeBSD. I've mostly wondered about how they technically compare though. Facebook seems to think Linux is generally faster for example[1]. I'd love to follow this more closely but I haven't found a LWN equivalent for the BSDs.
I think the best answer there is "it depends". Facebook has an open job posting which states that "Our goal over the next few years is for the Linux kernel network stack to rival or exceed that of FreeBSD" [1], so clearly there's at least one place in Facebook where Linux does not provide the best performance...
Within the past couple of months, I believe. Speculation at the time was that this was fallout from Facebook devops trying to port Whatsapp to run on Facebook's systems.
He also runs http://www.tarsnap.com/ which is arguably the most secure (and cost effective) back up solution in the market.
(I'm in no way affiliated with Colin and/or Tarsnap. Just a fan of his work and humble attitude.)