The Untold Story: How FreeBSD Powered NetEase’s First Email Service

In 1997, Ding Lei, founder of NetEase, noticed the revolutionary service Hotmail, which was free and accessible via a web browser.

Seeing a huge commercial opportunity, Ding attempted to buy Hotmail for $10,000, but the price was far beyond his reach. He therefore decided to develop his own email system, choosing FreeBSD as the server operating system.

After seven months, the email system was completed and sold to Guangzhou Telecom for over one million yuan, along with the free domain 163.net. The service quickly exploded: 163.net attracted more than 2,000 daily registrations and grew to 300,000 users, helping NetEase earn a profit of four million yuan by the end of 1998.

Ding Lei’s first fortune came from this venture, prompting the question: why FreeBSD instead of Linux? At that time, Linux had not yet proven its value in the commercial server market, while Unix and its many variants (Solaris, AIX, HP‑UX, IRIX) dominated servers.

FreeBSD, a free Unix‑like system, offered a complete TCP/IP stack and could reliably run services such as WWW, email, FTP, NFS, firewalls, and BBS. In simple terms, it could turn a cheap PC into a powerful network server.

Ding later wrote that Hotmail’s 20 million users ran on more than 500 FreeBSD servers, and Yahoo’s 50 servers also used FreeBSD, illustrating the OS’s pivotal role in late‑1990s internet services.

Despite its strengths, FreeBSD eventually lost ground to Linux. The story continues with Ken Thompson bringing Unix to Berkeley, Bill Joy extending it into BSD, and the 1992 AT&T lawsuit forcing Berkeley to rewrite the source, leading to the creation of 386BSD by Lynne and William Jolitz.

Linus Torvalds later remarked that if 386BSD had been available, Linux might never have been created. The BSD community’s conservative, quality‑focused approach contrasted with Linux’s experimental, rapid‑development culture, attracting more developers to the latter.

Linux’s ecosystem exploded, offering a vast array of packages and strong backing from vendors and major IT companies (IBM, Dell, HP). This accelerated its adoption in commercial environments, while FreeBSD’s democratic but slower decision‑making process lagged behind.

Nevertheless, FreeBSD remains vital today. Companies such as IBM, Nokia, Juniper Networks, and NetApp use it; gaming consoles like PlayStation and Nintendo Switch run on FreeBSD; and major services like Netflix, WhatsApp, and FlightAware rely on it. Moreover, FreeBSD is a core component of Darwin, the foundation of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS.