Why FreeBSD is great

FreeBSD is an OpenSource implementation of a complete UNIX-compatible operating system. It contains everything you need for a running system, including kernel, C libraries, commandline tools, installation program and a superb system to integrate and update third-party applications.

This page gives an overview on some of the outstanding features.

Why the GNU General public license (GPL) is not
The GNU General Public License (GPL), used by many popular free software packages, contains some requirements that makes it hard to use in the real world.

Most importantly, its clause that program modules under the GPL must not be linked with modules under licenses that add any term the GPL does not have, prevent many good software packages from being combined.

There is an alternative license - the LGPL - that has all the power to protect people's own work, but without the extended requirements that serve no other purpose than to force your will on someone else and his work.

Abortion of shell scripts and proper handling of signals.
In UNIX terminal sessions, you usually have a key like C-c (Control-C) to immediately end whatever program you have running in the foreground. This should work even when the program you called has called other programs in turn. Everything should be aborted, giving you your command prompt back, no matter how deep the call stack is.

Basically, it's trivial. But the existence of interactive applications that use SIGINT and/or SIGQUIT for other purposes than a complete immediate abort make matters complicated, and - as was to expect - left us with several ways to solve the problems. Of course, existing shells and applications follow different ways.

This web page outlines different ways to solve the problem and argues that only one of them can do everything right, although it means that we have to fix some existing software.