There is an article on VGLeaks about the Orbis OS. It's light on details but it has some photos of a dev kit booting. The screenshots look very easily faked to me but who knows.

FreeBSD would be an awesome choice. So many people can work with it well already and so many of the tools would be in place and ready to go. It's also a very solid foundation to start on as far as security is concerned.

It would explain why there is already so much middleware working on the PS4. It's great. It's an excellent way to kickstart high-quality games. It's a familiar hardware architecture running a familiar and mature OS.

That would be very wise of Sony if true

sony continues to be making the right decisions,

while in microsoft land, rumors have it that don mattrick might be either leaving microsoft or moving out of that division of microsoft as balmer is shifting people around.

I have no idea what is happening. Am I to be impressed / happy about this?

What are the advantages/disadvantages of using FreeBSD?

Their website sells it pretty well, but that's essentially just marketing material.

FreeBSD® is an advanced operating system for modern server, desktop, and embedded computer platforms. FreeBSD's code base has undergone over thirty years of continuous development, improvement, and optimization. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. FreeBSD provides advanced networking, impressive security features, and world class performance and is used by some of the world's busiest web sites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices.

FreeBSD is used as a platform for devices and products from many of the world's largest IT companies, including:

• Apple

• Cisco

• Juniper

• NetApp

FreeBSD is also used to power some of the biggest sites on the Internet, including:

• Yahoo!

• Yandex

• Apache

• Rambler

• Sina

• Pair Networks

• Sony Japan

• Netcraft

• NetEase

• Weathernews

• TELEHOUSE America

• Experts Exchange

and many more.

@selfconfessedcynic: BSD is Berkley System Distribution of Unix. It's a Unix operating system. It's been around forever. I see you are unfamiliar with operating systems. So here is the summary: Unix = The Best OS. That's all you really need to know.

@tourgen: Haha, my friend's father is a mathematician and security specialist and he agrees with you. But why is having a particular Unix OS good for games and gaming?

Since it's not like anybody is going to be using their PS4 as a computer, the exact version of the operating system kernel really doesn't matter. It's like how Android uses the Linux kernel, it doesn't really matter to the end user.

This could potentially be true from what Johnathan Blow was saying on the E3 Bombcast.

Yeah, it does not really matter. OS X is based to a small part on BSD. At this point every operating system in the world has some influences of Unix, hell even Windows has some influences from VMS. What matters are the developer tool Sony hands out.

If true, not a bad idea, though as @wuddel mentions, Unix is bloody everywhere. No surprise, since the OS has been around since 1969 and is the basis of other OSes such as Linux, MINIX and Mac OS X.

Given Sony's insistence on not reinventing the wheel this time (in contrast to what they did with the PS3), I'd be more surprised if Unix variants weren't all over the place here.

I don't know if I would want a free Blue Screen of Death guys. :(

This is brilliant if it's true. It would explain why developers have been talking up ease of coding for the PS4.

That would be crazy

Keep in mind that the Dev Kit OS isn't necessarily the shipped OS. I want to say variants of Red Hat were used as the Dev OSes for the PS2 and PS3.