FreeBSD
This information is taken from Deamonnews.org.
In 1992 and 1993, Jordan K. Hubbard, Rod Grimes, and Nate Williams had been working on 386BSD and releasing a set of changes known as the "Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit." Maintaining the patchkit had grown cumbersome and a new mechanism was needed. The three authors began working on a new project called "386BSD 0.5" which would contain all of the fixes and function as a real operating system. However, Jolitz removed his official approval of the project in early 1993. David Greenman, then at Walnut Creek, proposed a new operating system based on the patchkit with a new name: "FreeBSD."
Before long, Hubbard had contacted Walnut Creek to prepare a CDROM distribution channel. Walnut Creek went a step further and offered high bandwidth servers and hardware for development. The first CDROM release of FreeBSD was 1.0 in December of 1993. Being forced into upgrading the FreeBSD base from Net/2 to 4.4BSD Lite by the Novell/Berkeley lawsuit, FreeBSD 2.0 was released in November of 1994 and continuous upgrades and enhancements have been made since leaving the latest stable release at FreeBSD 4.2 and an experimental FreeBSD 5.0 operating system. This system includes a 4.4BSD Lite base with additions from NetBSD, OpenBSD, the Free Software Foundation and hundreds of other people and organizations.
According to Hubbard, the goal of the FreeBSD Project is "to provide software that may be used for any purpose and without strings attached." Walnut Creek, the FreeBSD Project's principal distributor, claims that "17 years of development has made it the world's most mature and robust network operating system" (sic). Major clients seem to agree. Yahoo!, the world's most frequented web site, serves up half a billion pages a day using FreeBSD. Even Microsoft's own free email provider, Hotmail, used (until recently) a combination of Windows, Solaris, and FreeBSD to reliably deliver email to over 30 million customers.
Even Walnut Creek themselves got into the act. In May of 1999, they set a daily transfer record of 1.39 terabytes from a single server, running FreeBSD. This record was later surpassed in September of 2000. Then, TeraSolutions, Inc., who acquired Walnut Creek's massive FTP archive after Walnut Creek merged with BSDi, served two terabytes of data to Internet customers using FreeBSD. TeraSolutions's co-founder, David Greenman said of FreeBSD, "We're very pleased to have servers that we built, running the FreeBSD operating system, set new milestones like this. It really shows just how well our large servers can perform in real-world situations using freely available software."
Perhaps what sets FreeBSD apart most is its technical simplicity. The FreeBSD installation program is widely regarded as the simplest Unix installation tool in existence. Further, its third party software system, the Ports Collection, has been modeled by NetBSD and OpenBSD and remains the most powerful application installation tool available. Through simple one-line commands, entire applications are downloaded, integrity checked, built, and installed making system administration amazingly simple.
FreeBSD's development model is similar to both NetBSD and OpenBSD, but radically different from the Linux development manual. Linus Torvalds has been described as a benevolent dictator; the modifications he likes are added. FreeBSD's development model revolves around a group of more than 200 individual programmers called the ``Committers.'' The Committers have the ability to make any change needed to the official FreeBSD source base at any time. The selection of Committers and dispute resolution are handled by the FreeBSD Core Team. The Core Team acts like a board of directors. Starting in October of 2000, the Core Team became an elected body with candidates and voters coming from the Committers. Elections are held every two years.
FreeBSD governance and development model lead to a very stable and easy to use system. As one of the most reliable operating systems for the x86 platform, FreeBSD's mark lies in sustaining an air of simplicity and stability.