FreeBSD
Free and open-source Unix-like operating system / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD[3] and the current version runs on x86, ARM, PowerPC and RISC-V processors. The project is supported and promoted by the FreeBSD Foundation.
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Developer | The FreeBSD Project |
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OS family | Unix-like (BSD) |
Working state | Current |
Source model | Open source |
Initial release | 1 November 1993; 30 years ago (1993-11-01) |
Latest release | 14.0 (20 November 2023; 5 days ago (2023-11-20)) [±][1] 13.2 (11 April 2023; 7 months ago (2023-04-11)) [±][2] |
Repository | |
Marketing target | Servers, workstations, embedded systems, network firewalls |
Package manager | pkg |
Platforms | x86-64, ARM64, ARM32, IA-32, PowerPC, RISC-V |
Kernel type | Monolithic with dynamically loadable modules |
Userland | BSD |
Default user interface | Unix shells: sh or tcsh (user-selectable) |
License | FreeBSD License, FreeBSD Documentation License |
Official website | www |
FreeBSD maintains a complete system, delivering a kernel, device drivers, userland utilities, and documentation, as opposed to Linux only delivering a kernel and drivers, and relying on third-parties like GNU for system software.[4] The FreeBSD source code is generally released under a permissive BSD license, as opposed to the copyleft GPL used by Linux.
The FreeBSD project includes a security team overseeing all software shipped in the base distribution. A wide range of additional third-party applications may be installed from binary packages using the pkg package management system or from source via FreeBSD Ports,[5] or by manually compiling source code.
As of 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular open-source BSD operating system, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed and permissively licensed BSD systems.[6] Much of FreeBSD's codebase has become an integral part of other operating systems such as Darwin (the basis for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS), TrueNAS (an open-source NAS/SAN operating system), and the system software for the PlayStation 3[7][8] and PlayStation 4[9] game consoles. The other BSD systems (OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD) also contain a large amount of FreeBSD code, and vice-versa[citation needed].
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