What is FreeBSD?
FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86
compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64
compatible (including Opteron, Athlon 64, and EM64T),
Alpha/AXP, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC®
architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of
developed at the
University of California, Berkeley. It is developed
and maintained by a
large team of individuals. Additional platforms are
in various stages of development.
Cutting edge features
FreeBSD offers advanced networking, performance, security
and compatibility
features
today which are still missing in other operating systems,
even some of the best commercial ones.
Powerful Internet solutions
FreeBSD makes an ideal
Internet or Intranet
server. It provides robust network services under the heaviest
loads and uses memory efficiently to maintain good response
times for thousands of simultaneous user processes.
Run a huge number of
applications
The quality of FreeBSD combined with today's low-cost,
high-speed PC hardware makes FreeBSD a very economical
alternative to commercial
workstations. It is well-suited
for a great number of both desktop and server
applications.
Easy to install
FreeBSD can be installed from a variety of media
including CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, floppy disk, magnetic tape,
an MS-DOS® partition, or if you have a network
connection, you can install it directly over
anonymous FTP or NFS. All you need is a couple of
formatted 1.44MB floppies and these
directions.
FreeBSD is free
While you might expect an operating system with these
features to sell for a high price, FreeBSD is available
free of charge
and comes with full source code. If you would like to
purchase or download a copy to try out,
more
information is available.
Contributing to FreeBSD
It is easy to contribute to FreeBSD. All you need to do
is find a part of FreeBSD which you think could be
improved and make those changes (carefully and cleanly)
and submit that back to the Project by means of send-pr
or a committer, if you know one. This could be anything
from documentation to artwork to source code. See the
Contributing
to FreeBSD article for more information.
Even if you are not a programmer, there are other
ways to contribute to FreeBSD. The FreeBSD
Foundation is a non-profit organization for which
direct contributions are fully tax deductible. Please
contact bod@FreeBSDFoundation.org
for more information or write to: The FreeBSD
Foundation, 7321 Brockway Dr., Boulder, CO 80303,
USA.
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