They famously did better than the proprietary shell tools in the original fuzzpocalypse https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~robby/courses/395-495-200... . I also think I recall reading, somewhere on jwz dot org, something which purported to be an internal SGI email giving a dismal account of the quality of the Irix tools. GNU tools often have expanded feature sets, too. But I think that GNU-tools adopters were probably also driven by a standardisation impulse to at least have the same bugs and quirks as everyone else.

Yes, here it is: “Software Usability II” by Tom Davis, the “Irix bloat memo” https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/sgi-irix-bloat-document.t... . Mind you, that bloat would probably look very modest nowadays.

> I don't know but it seems people (or at least old geezers) install GNU on top of Macs these days.

Me, I do this! I like being able to tack flags on after positional args if I remember them after typing a command. I like some of the convenience flags added to the GNU versions coreutils, grep, and findutils. Even `parallel` implementation I've used before is GNU parallel. I've never really learned mawk, to the extent I know awk at all, it's gawk.

(I don't like the common convention of prefixing them with `g` on macOS, either. I install them with Nix and just preempt the system ones on my PATH.)

Missing the little detail that since Sun started charging for developer tools, all other UNIX vendors followed suit, thus GCC finally started to get mindshare.

Their matrix community (spaces) sees a healthy level of discussions. Even those related to project governance. The project is very much alive. And I believe that they're also porting the COSMIC desktop to Redox.

It's arguable that the main reason Linux took off where BSD didn't was the fights and copyright arguments around BSD at the time.

Had they not existed, or BSD been obviously free and clear, Linux might have been a footnote.

I recall either Linus or a major Linux contributor (Alan Cox?) saying that if he had had a math coprocessor, he would have likely just ran BSD.

I don't think even 386BSD existed when Linus started Linux.

Embedded for sure eats the world. If you're looking at that then QNX, FreeRTOS, and similar options are also big in the running. The thing is if you're targeting a particularly well-defined piece of hardware and application, and you know you're going to want to customize and optimize for that combination, then you're generally going to be better off with a smaller, simpler starting point than something which is designed to run on pretty much everything and for almost any application. The different licenses complement that, but I think even if the licenses swapped the design and goal difference would affect things more.

> A similar situation occurred with Minix - to the extent that it's creator Andrew Tannenbaum had no idea it's install base was arguably bigger than Linux until 2017. Intel had put Minix into the Management Engine on their professional grade CPUs for years. The BSD license allowed Intel to put it everywhere without the knowledge of the wider Minix community.

Off topic question, but wasn't that a violation of the BSD license? It does require a copyright notice.

> FreeBSD code is also in iOS and macOS via Darwin […]

It is a common belief that Darwin has allegedly descended from FreeBSD, but there is not a lot in there: a pretty ancient snapshot of the FreeBSD userland, another snapshot of the TCP/IP stack that has now completely diverged from the current FreeBSD TCP/IP stack (or, more correctly, the other way round), plus a few borrowed kernel level API's (kqueue is the most notable one).

VMM, VFS, driver layers, file systems etc etc do not share the same lineage.

> Evidently BSD is a go-to choice for consumers today, but many don't realize it, and those of us who do often do not think about it.

Is this not even more true than with Linux in the billions strong Android?

At one point it was [1], and I'm not aware that that has changed. I've also a memory of talking to the seL4 team at a NICTA open day, and them saying it was widely deployed on Qualcomm based devices. It's not part of Android per se, sitting underneath Android and acting as a secure hypervisor, so any Android vulnerabilities are contained.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120211210405/http://www.ok-lab...