Not to be confused with OpenBSD, FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular open-source BSD operating system, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed and permissively licensed BSD systems.
FreeBSD has similarities with Linux, with two major differences in scope and licensing: FreeBSD maintains a complete system, i.e. the project delivers a kernel, device drivers, userland utilities, and documentation, as opposed to Linux only delivering a kernel and drivers, and relying on third-parties for system software; FreeBSD source code is generally released under a permissive BSD license, as opposed to the copyleft GPL used by Linux.
The FreeBSD project includes a security team overseeing all software shipped in the base distribution. A wide range of additional third-party applications may be installed from binary packages using the pkg package management system or from source via FreeBSD Ports, or by manually compiling source code.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team just announced the availability of FreeBSD version 13.2-RELEASE last April 11, 2023. It is the third release of the stable 13 branches. NixCraft Author Vivek Gite updated his FreeBSD version 13.1 to 13.2 using the CLI over an ssh-based session. Here are his quick notes.
