.H2 "A personal viewpoint"
FreeBSD is a labour of love: big commercial companies produce operating systems
and charge lots of money for them.  The FreeBSD team produce operating systems
and give them away.  That's not the only difference.
.P
Like a number of people involved with FreeBSD, I've been around computers for
quite some time.  Back in 1980 I had built my own S-100 microcomputer, as we
called them, and ran CP/M on it.  At work, of course, I had a \fIreal\fP
computer, and I was really itching to run real software on it.  I'd heard of
UNIX,\*F
.FS
Yes, UNIX is a registered trade mark of the Santa Cruz Operation.
.FE
and even tried an operating system that purported to run something like UNIX on
a Z-80.  But it was clear that something better had to happen, and the obvious
platform was Intel's not-so-new 8086, which had been languishing a couple of
years since its introduction in 1978 because nobody offered software for it.
Then I saw an advertisment from a company called Seattle Computer Products.
