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<h2>What is FreeBSD?</h2>
<p>FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86
compatible (including Pentium® and Athlon™), amd64
compatible (including Opteron™, Athlon 64, and EM64T),
Alpha/AXP, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC®
architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of
&unix; developed at the
University of California, Berkeley. It is developed
and maintained by <a
href="&base;/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/index.html">a
large team of individuals</a>. Additional <a
href="&base;/platforms/index.html">platforms</a> are
in various stages of development.</p>
<h2>Cutting edge features</h2>
<p>FreeBSD offers advanced networking, performance, security
and compatibility
<a href="&base;/features.html">features</a>
today which are still missing in other operating systems,
even some of the best commercial ones.</p>
<h2>Powerful Internet solutions</h2>
<p>FreeBSD makes an ideal
<a href="&base;/internet.html">Internet or Intranet</a>
server. It provides robust network services under the heaviest
loads and uses memory efficiently to maintain good response
times for thousands of simultaneous user processes.</p>
<h2>Run a huge number of
applications</h2>
<p>The quality of FreeBSD combined with today's low-cost,
high-speed PC hardware makes FreeBSD a very economical
alternative to commercial &unix;
workstations. It is well-suited
for a great number of both desktop and server
<a href="&base;/applications.html">applications</a>.</p>
<h2>Easy to install</h2>
<p>FreeBSD can be installed from a variety of media
including CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, floppy disk, magnetic tape,
an MS-DOS® partition, or if you have a network
connection, you can install it <i>directly</i> over
anonymous FTP or NFS. All you need is a couple of
formatted 1.44MB floppies and <a
href="&base;/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install.html">these
directions</a>.</p>
<h2>FreeBSD is <i>free</i></h2>
<a href="&base;/copyright/daemon.html"><img src="gifs/dae_up3.gif" alt="The BSD Daemon" height="81" width="72" align="right" border="0"></a>
<p>While you might expect an operating system with these
features to sell for a high price, FreeBSD is available
<a href="&base;/copyright/index.html">free of charge</a>
and comes with full source code. If you would like to
purchase or download a copy to try out,
<a href="&base;/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors.html">more
information is available</a>.</p>
<h2>Contributing to FreeBSD</h2>
<p>It is easy to contribute to FreeBSD. All you need to do
is find a part of FreeBSD which you think could be
improved and make those changes (carefully and cleanly)
and submit that back to the Project by means of send-pr
or a committer, if you know one. This could be anything
from documentation to artwork to source code. See the
<a href="&base;/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/index.html">Contributing
to FreeBSD</a> article for more information.</p>
<p>Even if you are not a programmer, there are other
ways to contribute to FreeBSD. The <a
href="http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org">FreeBSD
Foundation</a> is a non-profit organization for which
direct contributions are fully tax deductible. Please
contact <a
href="mailto:board@FreeBSDFoundation.org">board@FreeBSDFoundation.org</a>
for more information or write to: The FreeBSD
Foundation, 7321 Brockway Dr., Boulder, CO 80303,
USA.</p>
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