“We had a huge chunk of our engineering staff spending time improving FreeBSD as opposed to working on features and functionalities. What’s happened now with the transition to having a Debian basis, the people I used to have 90 percent of their time working on FreeBSD, they’re working on ZFS features now … That’s what I want to see; value add for everybody versus sitting around, implementing something Linux had a years ago. And trying to maintain or backport, or just deal with something that you just didn’t get out of box on FreeBSD.”

I still hold much love for FreeBSD, but this is very much indicative of my experience with it as well. The tooling in FreeBSD, specifically dtrace, bhyve, jails, and zfs was absolutely killer while Linux was still experiencing teething problems with a nonstandard myriad of half developed and documented tools. But Linux has since then matured, adopted, and standardized. And the strength of the community is second to none.

They'll be happier with Linux.

As soon as they came out with scale, I knew core was going to be cut off when scale got good enough. There are just more possibilities with what you can do with Linux. The extra community support can not be understated as valuable to a profit driven company. At the end of the day, they gotta eat too and having one base system instead of two is the way they need to do it. The features are growing much faster on scale than they ever were on core in my opinion.

Good!