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 UNIX® 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 UNIX® 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.