Looking at Netcraft's August 2019 report:<p>> Netflix chose FreeBSD for its balance of stability and features (as did Netcraft once upon a time), but it is becoming an increasingly less common frontend operating system on the web as a whole. Only 60,200 (0.67%) web-facing computers are running FreeBSD today.<p>Source: https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2019/08/15/august-2019-web-server-survey.html<p>In fact, a bigger percentage of Tor relays run FreeBSD than web servers.<p>While many of the open-source server-side web components support FreeBSD (not all, thanks Docker), almost everyone running an open-source web stack (as opposed to Microsoft/.NET) runs Linux instead of BSD/Illumos. Why? Bigger community? Docker? Better cloud support?<p>I'm only talking about the web, not every single app running on OSS (FreeBSD is prevalent on firewalls and network/storage appliances).
FreeBSD doesn't have as much funding, resources as Linux and therefore is always behind on various things. This pushes people to switch to Linux for one reason or another even if initially they were using FreeBSD and also pushes software developers to neglect FreeBSD, not providing proper support and giving even more reasons to switch. Like memory compression stuff on Linux that FreeBSD is behind on or Golang, while claiming FreeBSD support, not actually doing it all that well.