As the BSD projects (DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD) have grown in size, a number of persistent myths have grown up around them. Some of these are perpetuated by well meaning but misguided individuals, others by people pursuing their own agendas.

This page aims to dispel those myths while remaining as dispassionate as possible.

• *BSD has a closed development model, it’s more “Cathedral’” than “Bazaar”
• You can’t make your own distributions or derivative works of *BSD
• *BSD makes a great server, but a poor desktop
• The *BSD codebase is old, outdated, and dying
• The *BSD projects are at war with one another, splinter groups form each week
• You can’t cluster *BSD systems (parallel computing)
• There’s no commercial support for *BSD
• There are no applications for *BSD
• *BSD is better than (some other system)
• (some other system) is better than *BSD