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BSD Operating Systems

Overview of the BSDs 476

Posted by michael from the don't-want-to-go-on-the-cart dept.
zeekiorage writes "A good informative article about the various BSD OSs, their legacy, philosophy and importance on the ExtremeTech web site. Excerpt from the article: 'Nowadays, the term 'The BSDs' refers to the family of operating systems which were derived, to a greater or lesser extent, from BSD. The five best known BSDs are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, and Darwin (which serves as the foundation for Apple's MacOS X). But virtually all modern operating systems -- from Windows to BeOS to Linux -- rely on crucial BSD code to run.'"
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Overview of the BSDs

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  • BSD (Score:5, Interesting)

    by glamslam ( 535995 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @02:50PM (#4346472)
    I've always wondered why Linux gets the mainstream press and BSD is not well known. Is it the licence???

    • Re:BSD (Score:5, Insightful)

      by coene ( 554338 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @02:57PM (#4346540)
      I think (the 1 paragraph answer), Linux is popular because of the "Tech Boom Era", where companies could get millions in funding for having a business plan written on a napkin. Linux embodied the "One Smart Guy Takes On The World", and "Everything Is Changing" ideals that drove the economy a few years back. To think that Linus, a single guy, with a rag-tag group of developers, with their sandals and freakishly stylish hair, could make an OS that would compete with the biggest and best offerings from Sun and IBM. Its a cultural thing. Linux had timing. BSD has been around much longer, and its much more mature than Linux. Linux has GREAT marketing, BSD has (basically) none.

      Its not about the technology, but about the marketing, the timing, and the media's embrace.

      • Re:BSD (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Krow10 ( 228527 ) <cpenning@milo.org> on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:23PM (#4346739) Homepage
        Blockquoth the poster:
        Linux had timing. BSD has been around much longer, and its much more mature than Linux. Linux has GREAT marketing, BSD has (basically) none.


        Its not about the technology, but about the marketing, the timing, and the media's embrace.
        It is true that linux had timing, but it predates the tech boom era by a few years. Back in the day (early '90s,) linux could be downloaded anonymously without making any promises to anyone. There were still concerns regarding AT&T code in BSD at that time. Linux was just the easiest to get (from my perspective) in those days, and it was clearly and unambiguously free (beer.) This meant that it had a larger hobbyist install base than BSD, and that is why it is more popular now, IMO. All the stuff you talk about is true. But it wouldn't have happened if BSD had been as readily available as linux. BSD had the reputation of being a "real" Unix, and I would have chosen it over linux if I had been able to easily get my hands on it in '92. I suspect other early adopters would have as well.

        -Craig

        • Re:BSD (Score:2, Insightful)

          by FatRatBastard ( 7583 )
          Another reason, which is ironic, is back in the early 90's it was the perception of the BSD community that was a stickler for a lot of people. The BSD crowd (rightly or wrongly) were percieved as an insular, clubby, bickering bunch. A lot of folks worked on Linux because they had a "nicer" development community.

          Now, I'm not saying this perception was warrented, but I know more than one person who held this view.

          Of course, now the tables have turned and its Linux who's mentioned when you talk about issues about "the community"

          • Re:BSD (Score:2, Interesting)

            by JDizzy ( 85499 )
            Yeah, this is true...

            "Condesending unix users" is the term I used to hear flote around. You also have to remember that FreeBSD didn't exist until 94, and linux started in like 92'ish. At the time, people would use BSDos as a cheap alternative to SunOS, and at the time SUNos was still BSD driven. Later on when Sun went to a SYSv frame-work from att, things started to change. Solaris hit the scean like a shockwave, and FreeBSD, and NetBSD were back to obscurity. In america, a bunch of small dial-up ISP's started to use FreeBSD as an alternative to Sun Unix, since it was free. This is what drove the BSD's to the point they are now. Now we have a much larger user base, and yet we are still supposedly dead according to your typical slashdot troll. WE have conventions each year where we decide what features will be worked on in the next year, and what features are good enought to insert into the existing dist's. We have heritage that dates back to Bill Joy implementing TCP/IP into the kernel, and everything in between then and now. Most importantly, we do not exist on a virus like license that entraps developers who wish to modify code (yes, I'm talking about GPL).

            It is true that FreeBSD development is more based on a clique of developers than a rag-tag group of hackers that work on Linux distributions. AT one time, the clique was very exclusive, but now it is basically like the way it was for Finux in 97. WE are always gainning more steam.

      • Re:BSD (Score:5, Interesting)

        by LunaticLeo ( 3949 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @06:20PM (#4347777) Homepage
        What an ingnorant and rediculous answer. I swear slashdot needs a high-user-id-filter.

        I can give a much better and factually based argument for all all those dumb slashdoters who moded this junk up.

        In the very early 1990s, AT&T and BSDi were just finishing up their copyright dispute (btw, AT&T was in the right on some things and BSDi on others).

        The two people maintaining 386BSD were not accepting desperate pleas by BSDers to indegrate some IDE patches. FreeBSD started largely because of the 386BSD maintainers recalcitrance.

        On the other hand, Linux was quickly gaining steam and it was a wild and woolly time. IDE support was in Linux 12 to 18 months prior to FreeBSD (at least in what each camp claimed was the "stable" version).

        Developers with cheap PCs with IDE controllers flocked to Linux. Lots of newbies, and I was one of them, bought ISA IDE cards and new drives to replace their RLL drives, just to run Linux.

        BSD was clearly more mature compared to Linux in the early days. I believe Linux started winning the Linux vs. FreeBSD debate around Linux 2.2. Both NetBSD and OpenBSD have less sofisticated features for very good reasons. NetBSD is port-anywhere, and OpenBSD is run by a paranoid schizophrenic (sometimes that is a good thing:). And while I said Linux wins (in my mind) vs. FreeBSD (scalabilty, features, drivers, speed, etc.); FreeBSD is still an excellent kernel and has a few very cool features that I wish Linux had. FreeBSD as a distribution is a very compelling product. Ports rule.

        If the "Tech Boom Era" was a factor in the FreeBSD vs. Linux on cheep PCs competition, FreeBSD would win. During the "Tech Boom Era", most of the biggest Porn sites (porn is the biggest money maker, and driver of bandwidth), have traditionally run on FreeBSD because of its consistant stability under extreme load, and efficient TCP/IP stack. Yahoo was built on FreeBSD. UUNet was a MAJOR FreeBSD user. If the "Tech Boom Era" is anything to go by, FreeBSD should have "won".

        Bottom line, both kernels (linux and freebsd) were/are on a geometric growth curve, Linux had 12-18 month lead time with IDE, that is why Linux "won".

        Oh! and Linus Torvalds is a fucking genius. I am not sure what he is a genius at, but as an all around Project Maintainer he is a fucking genius.
      • It's all about the penguin. ;-)

        Slightly more seriously, I think the "cowboy" attitude of the linux community has helped.

        Example: Don't like slow NFS? Just change the defaults (in older kernels) to async.

        The BSD "folks" seem (to me) as very conservative compared to the fast-and-footloose anything-for-a-thrill linux "folks". They seem "ivory tower"-ish compared to the "real world" linux people.

        Also different between the two communities is that Linus pulled in all the GNU project tools to create and operating system. Since the GNU tools were already popular in the early 1990s, people could move to a GNU/Linux system and feel right at home. The BSD-derived operating systems come with BSD baggage that makes them hard to use for non-BSD folks

        Summary: GNU/Linux systems make better use of existing software and trends than BSD systems, which increasese popularity and effiency.

        Now I'll hit post, read what I wrote, and see if I believe it. ;-)

        -Paul Komarek

    • Re:BSD (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:02PM (#4346577) Homepage
      One word: optics.

      News works like this .. when a dog bites a man, thats relevant and important news (because you dont want to be bitten, right?) The problem is, its not news that sells. And so you end up with media that would rather print the "man bites dog" story intead of the "dog bites man" story, even tho "man bites dog" stories have little or no relation to your continued existance and are unlikely ever to affect your life.

      So BSD has always been doing well in the server/ISP/*nix market, so its not news. Linux's surge in popularity, and thus all the wonderful brand value you can leech off of its popularist image, is responsible for all the bru-haha.

      The only other thing worth mentionning is that most of the GUI stuff going on, which matters most to end users, was written by people on Linux .. and get ported to the BSDs after. From that perspective, you could argue that Linux is the more important OS for the end user since thats where all the desktop wars are being fought in the *nix world.

    • Re:BSD (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MrResistor ( 120588 ) <peterahoffNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:16PM (#4346690) Homepage
      The Linux community is larger. I'm guessing that this is because Linux was written for x86 origionally, and was therefore available for the platform just about everybody has before BSD was. Obviously this is not true now, but momentum is a hard thing to overcome. I'm not confident on my timeline here, so if someone could prove that BSD was available for x86 prior to 1991, I'd happily concede the point.

      The Linux community is less mature. Obviously there are some negative aspects to this, and I'm sure you could find a few BSD folks who would be happy to list them for you. However, there are positive aspects as well. The most important, I think, is that it leads to more focus on things "normal" people (meaning people who aren't sysops) care about, like games. This lures more "normal" people into the community, who lure their frinds into the community, making it larger.

      The Linux community is more vocal. I think this is largely connected to the "immaturity" of the Linux community, and serves as both blessing and curse. Regardless, the world listens to those who speak out, and the fact that our culture glorifies youth almost to the point of worship goes a long way towards mitigating the negative aspects of the lack of maturity in the public eye.

      Anyway, that's my take on it. For the record, I'm a Linux guy. To my knowledge I have never used a BSD.

      • Re:BSD (Score:3, Funny)

        by McCart42 ( 207315 )
        To my knowledge I have never used a BSD.

        Friends don't let friends drink and dual-boot.

      • Re:BSD (Score:2, Troll)

        by MobyTurbo ( 537363 )
        The Linux community is larger. I'm guessing that this is because Linux was written for x86 origionally, and was therefore available for the platform just about everybody has before BSD was. Obviously this is not true now, but momentum is a hard thing to overcome. I'm not confident on my timeline here, so if someone could prove that BSD was available for x86 prior to 1991,
        386BSD and it's commercial cousin BSD/386 (now BSD/OS) existed at around the same time as Linux kernel version 0.95 as I recall from Usenet posts. (A Linux user since 0.95 who has since migrated to Free and NetBSD.)
        I'd happily concede the point.
        Happily concede the point then. :-) At the most Linux was available on the 386 in a useful form a few months before BSD; if it weren't for the AT&T lawsuit during a crucial period you might have not made this statement:
        Anyway, that's my take on it. For the record, I'm a Linux guy. To my knowledge I have never used a BSD.
        Because you'd be running BSD. (Linus himself said that *he* would have run BSD if it weren't for the timing and the lawsuit.)

        • Re:BSD (Score:5, Interesting)

          by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @05:59PM (#4347685) Homepage

          This is a personal perspective, others' opinions will probably differ. The lawsuit mattered, but it wasn't the only factor.

          The explosive growth of Linux in the early days had more to do with personal dynamics than with much else. In the early days, Linus welcomed contributors and worked well with them, but no one could work with the Jolitzes, and the other early BSD projects were similarly elite, with a lot of backbiting going on between the various groups even in the early days. I am a UC Berkeley alum (EECS PhD) and certainly take a great deal of pride in all the contributions that came out of Berkeley, but I was also present at a number of Usenix BOFs where members of one or another of the BSD factions would bitterly denounce someone from another faction, all the while with the AT&T/UCB/BSDI lawsuit hanging over everyone's heads. In addition to the legal cloud, there were the personal relationship clouds, and in the end, free software is a highly social activity, one that the BSD people were never as good at as the Linux people.

          When I saw the early Linux kernels I thought that the quality was way inferior to what the BSD folks had at the time, and I was probably right, but the Linux folks had an attractive spirit, they were getting better by leaps and bounds, and the BSD folks thought they knew better than anyone else and those outside the club weren't welcome. Linux had drivers for just about every cheap card around, and many of them were buggy but at least they were usable, and in many cases people reporting bugs got a usable patch within days. BSD had well-written drivers, but for far fewer devices, and usually only the kinds of expensive devices that sysadmins at universities (but not home users) had access to. Now I'm talking about the 1992-1995 time period here; since then things have shifted around considerably and all the competitors have drivers for just about everything. But it was the initial momentum that set the stage for what followed.

          One place where the non-copylefted nature of BSD did seem to have an effect was in the suspicion that a lot of the Berkeley CS grad students had about the schemes (their version) of the BSDI folk, and the FUD that got spread around about what was being given back and what wasn't, especially given that a couple of folks were working for CSRG and BSDI at the same time. Between this rather unattractive clique-ridden gang of exclusive gurus, and the bunch of wild and wooly Linux folks who were just whacking away and learning as they went, the Linux folks just looked much more attractive to a lot of people.

    • Yes (Score:2, Redundant)

      by jhines ( 82154 )
      The GPL is a source of contention.

      MS doesn't have a problem with the BSD license, because it allows for incorporation into proprietary applications, like the TCPIP code in Windows.

      • Re:Yes (Score:2, Informative)

        by videodriverguy ( 602232 )
        Yet again, more crap about the TCP/IP stack in Windows.
        The Windows NT TCP/IP STREAM code was written by Spider Software in Edinburgh, Scotland. MS bought it and spent a lot of time making it thread and SMP safe. The stream code itself was a clean room implementation of the AT&T system V code - AFAIK BSD has never had streams and never will have. At the time the NT was being written the BSD code was unclean and fraught with legal problems.
        I've seen the code, and I also personally know the original developer of the Spider code.

    • Re:BSD (Score:2, Interesting)

      by aussersterne ( 212916 )
      It's because Linux is better suited to desktop PC's. I "grew up" on SunOS systems. At the time, they were super-cool to me... comparing my 286 DOS PC at home with the *nix systems in the labs was a humbling experience indeed.

      But times have changed! The 386 processor made its way into personal computers, and with it... *nix!

      But times haven't changed that much for BSD. *BSD ship as fairly vanilla-flavored, purist offerings. Great, if you like to feel like you're still running SunOS in 1991. Great, if you like to have to grab things from ports yourself.

      But grab a Linux distribution and install it, and you've got nicely thought out dotfiles, GNU tools and a ton of other binaries out of the box to provide some basic level of user-friendliness (which is good, even for *nixheads) and you've got driver support for things like TV tuner cards and parallel port devices that are likely to occur on desktop PCs. Days of legwork are not required to get your system running like you like it.

      By contrast, when using *BSD on x86, the user experience for me isn't much different from installing commercial Unixes like Solaris from media onto Sun hardware... I always spend a day swearing under my breath as I have to pound the 'net to download and in some cases compile all of my favorite tools and applications, rework a bunch of dotfiles/config files and so forth and so on, just to make the system behave as nicely as my Linux system did ten minutes after install. Some call preinstalling and preconfiguring applications like Linux distros often do "bloat" but I call it saving my time. I'd rather waste an extra 400MB (geez, what's that, like... a few quarters worth?) on my 120GB hard drive by installing software I might not use (but who knows, someday I might) than install a relatively bare operating system and then have to spend time selecting, browsing, downloading, compiling...

      *BSD is great if you're running a headless server, but Linux has made *nix a viable out-of-the-box personal computing platform, as much as people like to bash Linux's desktop prowess when compared to Windows.

      I guess the short answer is that I use Linux because I just don't want to spend the time after installing *BSD to make it work and act like... Linux!

      • Re:BSD (Score:4, Interesting)

        by SN74S181 ( 581549 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:43PM (#4346871)
        I guess the short answer is that I use Linux because I just don't want to spend the time after installing *BSD to make it work and act like... Linux!

        What a ridiculous tautology.

        I use BSD because I don't want to have to spend the time after letting some Linux distro spew candy and BS onto my hard drive to make it work and act like UNIX.

        The base NetBSD download is about 60 megs compressed. I download and install that and I've got a working base system to adapt to my needs. Plus, there's one distribution of NetBSD, I can install it on my Intel boxes, my Sparc boxes, on about any odd hardware I find, and the .dotfiles and config is virtually identical. Compare that to the 5-35 different 'distributions' of Linux available for each architecture.

        Part of the beauty of the BSDs is they follow the bloody standards that have evolved over the last 30 years of UNIX. I can pick up any good Administration book and find the info I need to get the features I am concerned with up and running.

        • Re:BSD (Score:3, Interesting)

          by sydb ( 176695 )
          The base NetBSD download is about 60 megs compressed. I download and install that and I've got a working base system to adapt to my needs. Plus, there's one distribution of NetBSD, I can install it on my Intel boxes, my Sparc boxes, on about any odd hardware I find, and the .dotfiles and config is virtually identical. Compare that to the 5-35 different 'distributions' of Linux available for each architecture.

          This [debian.org] is why [ssc.com] Linux has Debian [debian.org]

          Actually Net and Free BSD have (are getting) Debian too.

          Which highlights that this whole fucking linux vs BSD argument is misnamed. Linux is a kernel. The userland is substantially GNU, with a plethora of third-party contributions and appropriations.

          So everyone start comparing kernel features and lay off userland.

      • Re:BSD (Score:3, Informative)

        by Fweeky ( 41046 )
        Most BSD's come with binary packages on the install CD(s). No need to download anything if you don't want to.

        Personally I prefer FreeBSD ports to dpkg/apt. And I *loved* apt when I was using Debian :)

        I'd prolly still use a Linux for a desktop though, but for servers, Linux can go jump in a lake.
    • Yes I think its the license. The BSD license is supposed to be more corporate friendly but in reality it isn't. Because anything under the BSD license can be "embraced and extended" it doesn't offer companies any safety if they want to offload a product into the public domain.

      For example the XFS work from SGI. SGI could safely give Linux the XFS because:
      a) It gets people familiar with XFS
      b) It gets SGI one step closer to being able to get IRIX costs off their budget
      c) All development of XFS passes back to SGI.

    • Re:BSD (Score:2)

      by Bishop ( 4500 )
      The license is not a real issue. Developers choose one over the other for various reasons. Most users don't care.

      Linux beat BSD primariy due to timing. Linux was ready to use and available (a few) months before FreeBSD. 386BSD had licensing issues with AT&T. It delayed the release of a free, as in source, BSD by up to a year. By that time Linux had gained a huge mindshare. At the time users were dieing for a *nix to use on their 386s at home. Linus was just lucky with his timing.

      With an early mindshare gain Linux was able to quickly reach a critical mass of developers. As a result Linux has had better driver support, and more features. Such as decent SMP.

  • Getting Started with OpenBSD... (Score:5, Informative)

    by coene ( 554338 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @02:51PM (#4346489)
    A lot of people have heard of, and want to look into OpenBSD... I urge you, take an afternoon or night, and give it a shot! The FAQ is excellent and can get you running in no time!

    http://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html

    I've found it to be the best, and sometimes only suitable OS for the job when it comes to network tasks.
  • 'Nowadays, the term 'The BSDs' refers to the family of operating systems which were derived, to a greater or lesser extent, from BSD. The five best known BSDs are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, and Darwin (which serves as the foundation for Apple's MacOS X).

    But I thought OSX wasn't considered a *nix [freshmeat.net]...
    • The core of OSX is BSD. It borrows technology from NEXT. I can hit the terminal icon to get a shell just as fast as I can in Linux/X11. It has dmesg. It has the BSD network stack. It has every UNIX command that comes in a base distro of F/N/OBSD (and most of Linux!).

      Its UNIX, pretty-itized!!!
    • just ask all the hardcore Unix users who have tried to change their OS X settings using configuration files in /etc, only to find all their changes ignored. Apple's Unix-like operating system uses NetInfo, for a configuration datastore, something more akin to the Windows registry we all know and hate.

      Uhh, OS X (Darwin) lets you choose how your configurations work. You can use the /etc files if you want to, but NetInfo is the default. And please, it's not like the registery. NetInfo is open, and you can use it over the network for settings and authentication.

      His other complaints center around missing programs like gcc and gdb that aren't installed by default, but come on the developer CD. I dunno, it seems like with Mac programs being distributed in binary form, that the free, included developer CD is an appropriate place for this. Maybe we could claim that he didn't do a complete installation if he didn't install the developer CD.

      Then he rants about OS X running Microsoft applications, like that makes OS X not a UNIX, and then rants about OS X not being open source, like that somehow makes it not a UNIX. Is open source a requirement to be called a UNIX?

      Like I said, crack.

      • I didn't get any "included Developer CD". But it was reasonably painless to download the stuff. I would like to see a mass-market machine that includes a compiler, I think there is a lot of stuff programs could do if they could assumme access to a compiler.

    • OS X is as "Unix" as Linux (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tqbf ( 59350 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:58PM (#4346982) Homepage
      You're referencing an article by some random CalPoly student that says Darwin isn't Unix. That's not an authoritative source. It's disingenuous to pretend that it is. Your cited article is also awful:

      Darwin's not Unix, it's NeXT. This is bound to surprise NeXT users, most of whom have considered NeXT to be (by virtue of extensive Objective C APIs) the best Unix development environment in existance. But it's also a broken argument, because Darwin has a mostly FreeBSD userland. "strings /usr/bin/* | grep Id".

      Required for "Unix" Status: bash, gcc, fortune. That rules out SunOS 5, which ships with neither a compiler, the GNU shell, or fortune (by default). There are installations of Linux and FreeBSD (especially for router configurations) that don't include the compiler. And, of course, the argument depends on the notion that "not having gcc on the main installer CD" means "not having gcc".

      Required for "Unix" Status: canonical /etc configuration. This is bound to surprise anyone who has maintained a large network of Unix servers. NetInfo is NeXT's answer to YP. OpenBSD had a near-fanatical devotion to YP, which is Sun's standard distributed configuration system. Solaris doesn't respect files in /etc that conflict with the nameservice caching system.

      Required for "Unix" Status: X11. This is funny because the author, who derides Display PDF, is seemingly ignorant of Display Postscript, the SunOS windowing system that inspired Apple's Quartz. How authoritative is an article that asserts that Gosling lacks Unix cred? I'm also sure it annoys the author that X11 is easier to install on OS X (it's a single downloadable package --- drag the folder to Applications/ and it's done) than it is on Linux.

      Apple has put an immense amount of effort into Open Source systems technology. They maintain and extend GCC. They've exposed the Macintosh development community to GCC. Apple does not lack Unix or OSS credibility.

      Of course, it's obvious why Linux users lash out against OS X. OS X is genuinely more attractive as a desktop environment, regardless of your technical stripe, than Linux is. Yes. people get by with KDE and Gnome. But some people still run Solaris as a desktop environment too. Most of the rest of the world has moved on.

      The REAL Unix philosophy has more to do with everything being a file, named in the filesystem (not an Object Handle), and all IO being performed through file descriptors, and having a C-language interface between userland and kernel, than it does any of the fancy userland programs that Linux ships with. What are they teaching people at CalPoly now?

      • Required for "Unix" Status: canonical /etc configuration. This is bound to surprise anyone who has maintained a large network of Unix servers. NetInfo is NeXT's answer to YP. OpenBSD had a near-fanatical devotion to YP, which is Sun's standard distributed configuration system. Solaris doesn't respect files in /etc that conflict with the nameservice caching system.

        I agree with most of what you're saying, minus the obvious flamebait, but I couldn't quite let this one go. Solaris does respect files in /etc over other name services -- it all comes down to the /etc/nsswitch.conf file. Make a line that looks like this:

        passwd: files nis
        group: files nis

         and you will have entries in /etc overriding the entries in the other nameservice (nis, in this case).

        Incidentally, glibc (used by every Linux distribution that I care about for a desktop or server) has copied this mechanism.

      • Of course, it's obvious why Linux users lash out against OS X. OS X is genuinely more attractive as a desktop environment, regardless of your technical stripe, than Linux is.
        >>>>>>>>>>>
        Speak for yourself. I make a point to use OS X as often as I can, just so I can bash it without qualms. And having used OS X on a bunch of fancy new wide-screen iMacs for awhile, here are the things I hate about it:

        1) Fonts. Ass-ugly fonts. OS X fonts are a mass of grey ugliness. Absolutely no comparison to ClearType, or even the rendering in FreeType CVS + FT-Slight (which would be about an inch away from ClearType if it didn't break sub-pixel rendering).

        2) Speed. Yes the GUI is slow. The only time I've seen worse resizing is when I used Win95 on a 486/33. Even console stuff is slower, especially gcc and whatnot.

        3) Flexibility. OS X doesn't hold a candle in terms of flexibility compared to my KDE 3.x. And to me, who interfaces with the computer hours a day, getting everything setup just perfectly is important. And guess what, I don't like Aqua! I think Keramik rulez (though its too bright for my LCD). My favorite, however, is .NET with the Atlas-Green color scheme. Yes its flat. Yes its simple. Yes its green. The antithesis of Aqua, I like to think...
        • Speaking as a OSX/OS9/Linux tribooter, I've found value in all three systems. The one point I disagree in your post is Fonts, I would call Linux fonts closer to ass-ugly. The rendering engine is much improved, and so long as you get the MS fonts, it is passable, but without decent fonts (which most distros don't ship with), things are really ugly. Without the bytecode interpretor, things are ugly.

          All that said, the flexibility and speed are the biggest reasons why I use Gentoo more than the MacOS systems. MacOS systems have better software support, but that's about it. OSX is certainly leaps and bounds more tolerable than any MS operating system, and has every game I like, and professional apps I like, and is pretty rock solid, so I don't begrudge booting into it...
          • Speaking as a OSX/OS9/Linux tribooter, I've found value in all three systems. The one point I disagree in your post is Fonts, I would call Linux fonts closer to ass-ugly. The rendering engine is much improved, and so long as you get the MS fonts, it is passable, but without decent fonts (which most distros don't ship with), things are really ugly. Without the bytecode interpretor, things are ugly.
            >>>>>>>
            I would have to disagree about that. My situation is a little strange, but for me, Linux fonts have been amazing. First, I've got a 133dpi LCD, so without anti-aliasing, everything looks really bad. Second, I'm using Freetype 2.1.3 from CVS, with the Xft-slight hinting patch. It makes anti-aliased type look incredible, by applying just a little bit of hinting (unlike OS X which applies no hinting) and letting everything else fall in its natural place. I've got the bytecode interpreter disabled, because the autohinter in the CVS version has been tweeked to the point, that with anti-aliased rendering, the bytecode hints are unnecessary. The upside to this is that I can use whatever fonts I want. That said, even outside my admitedly special-case situation, Linux fonts look really good. Yes you need to enable the bytecode interpreter (RedHat 8.0 will ship with it on, and Gentoo already does) and you need the MS fonts, which are legal enough that responsible people like Keith Packard are not afraid of hosting them on his site. If you like your fonts sharp (like I did before I moved to this LCD) Linux easily matches WinXP even now. If you like them a little softer (not unfocused and greyed out like OS X, but just some softness at the edges) or are using a very high-res screen, then just wait a little while for the FreeType guys to finish their tweeking, or hell, just grab the FreeType CVS code, patch it with Xft-slight, rm -rf your old freetype libraries, and make install.
        • 1) Fonts. Ass-ugly fonts. OS X fonts are a mass of grey ugliness. Absolutely no comparison to ClearType, or even the rendering in FreeType CVS + FT-Slight (which would be about an inch away from ClearType if it didn't break sub-pixel rendering).

          I must respectfully disagree with you about this point. OS X has the most beautiful fonts I have ever seen anywhere. Many a time while hacking away on my iBook have I just randomly blurted out "damn these fonts look nice" just because I'm so impressed with how smooth and beautiful they are.

          2) Speed. Yes the GUI is slow. The only time I've seen worse resizing is when I used Win95 on a 486/33. Even console stuff is slower, especially gcc and whatnot.

          This is dependant on many things obviously. Resizing is slow on OS X, for sure, but other than that everything is quick and snappy on my system... and it's only a G3. gcc does not seem slow at all to me. You sure your iMacs are new? Those G4 iMacs fly in OS X.

          3) Flexibility....

          I personally don't equate flexibility with themes, but there have been a few (just search... I guess that's hard or something) and there will no doubt be many more soon once the demand and community get there.

          Anyway, my only reason for replying was because the fonts are anything but "ass-ugly." "OS X fonts are a mass of grey ugliness."

          Here I even have a screenshot [umd.edu] lying around which shows some beautiful fonts...

  • OpenBSD... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FuzzyMan45 ( 451645 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @02:52PM (#4346500)
    While i use OpenBSD 3.1 on my server at home, and love their security standpoint, i couldn't help but correct the article. It mentions that there's been one hole in 6 years, what it doesn't say, is that it is only the default install that has that track record, not the ports database or any of the apps people compile themselves. It's an important distinction to make.

    • Re:OpenBSD... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Raskolnk ( 26414 )
      It's an important distinction to make.

      Not really. An OS can't stake it's reputation on software out of it's control. No one is going to claim that their OS has been secure for every user who runs it, including users who've incorrectly installed/configured software on the OS. The best you can say is that the way it was distributed was clean, and you've done the best possible job of providing security support for user apps.

  • GPL isn't 'free'? (Score:2, Informative)

    by mssymrvn ( 15684 )
    The same is true of BSD. Consider its licensing policies versus Linux, for example. When code is licensed under the GNU General Public License or GPL (as is Linux), the license effectively eliminates any financial rewards anyone -- whether an individual or a corporation -- might hope to gain from improving upon it. It does this by compelling an author who uses any part of the code to give up the right to charge a license fee for the finished product.

    Now, it's been a while since I've read the GPL, but last time I checked, it's possible to charge whatever you want for GPL'ed software. But you have to give the source away for free. The use of the word 'effective' in this passage sort of skirts the issue, but the author then goes on to state that the BSDL is 'truly free' b/c it allows corporations to charge money for code developed with BSD-based source.

    Is the author an ex-MS employee or just confused?

    • Now, it's been a while since I've read the GPL, but last time I checked, it's possible to charge whatever you want for GPL'ed software.

      But you have to give whomever you sell it to access to the source code and a license to redistrubite (and even sell) your GPL'd software without paying you, asking you, or even notifying you.

      If Microsoft were to take, oh, let's say Ghostscript, and integrate it into MS Office, they would most likely go out of business within a quarter, because all of office would now be GPL'd. MS wouldn't have a choice.

      The GPL was designed by Stallman to work this way, and he & the FSF don't see it as a lack of "freedom"--but some people do. Some people like to have the option of not giving away their coding effort, which the GPL demands as payment for use of GPL'd code.
      • Thats why I love the GPL - the only people it pisses off are the companies that have enough resources not to need it.

        When Ballmer or whoever said the GPL was anti-American, I just had to laugh. Look at the BSD licence .. whats more anti-american than giving something away for free and demanding nothing (not even that that person honour your wish that they release their source code) ..

        Both licences have their times and places, and I'm not putting either above or below the other one, but it always struck me how the BSD licence is truely the anti-capitalist license in the sense that the 'cost' of using BSD'd software seems to be way lower than the cost of using GPL'd software.
    • He is neither. He is an astute, open minded thinker that CAN see the forest for the trees. By being forced to give out the source AND allow anyone that receives the source to distribute it any way they want. You absolutely "effectively" give away the code for free.

      And BSD truly is free in comparison. You are FREE to create both Open and Closed source from BSD code. That is freedom.

      You seem to indicate that either or possibly both of these are false. Care to explain which, and how, rather than postulating on a person's motives?
      • Here is the difference.

        If I get BSD code I can do pretty much whatever I want with it. Over time however commercial vendors are likely to create superior products to BSD licensed code and thus recreate a "closed source" situation. Conversely GPL code creates a community of developers which excludes closed source for profit developers.

        So the real question is: 3 generations out do you want the closed source developers or the open source developers excluded?

    • Re:GPL isn't 'free'? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 47PHA60 ( 444748 )
      The author has many issues with the GPL. Go to www.google.com and search the following:

      "brett glass" gpl

      To see what he writes. He has stated many times that it is an "unethical" license, and that it is a secret plan (or at least a purposefully obfuscated plan) to "destroy programmers' livelihoods." He also likes to split hairs down to the molecular level, and I don't advise the faint of heart using a metaphor to explain a position with which he disagrees, he'll start arguing about the metaphor.

      Now, I am a sick person for enjoying ad nauseum newsgroup debates, but search google with this:

      "brett glass" lynx GPL

      and skim the message thread. I found it hilarious. Richard Stallman even chimes in at one point, and the author accuses him of using the GPL to nurse a 30 year old grudge against Symbolics.

      Another fun time can be had by searching FreeBSD newsgroup archives where the author upbraids the core development team for a) refusing to supply features he wants, or b) deciding to stop supporting old versions of FreeBSD due to resource constraints (there is an amusing a.out vs. ELF thread somewhere in one of the archives).

      I may be wrong, but I think that there is something he does not get about the word "free."

      • Gah, I didn't catch that until you pointed it out. I remember that fool, he used to spam slashdot fairly often, he has a grudge on his shoulder the size of texas over the GPL. I was going to send the author of the story a nice note to correct his inaccurate statement on that subject, but in his case it's obviously not worth it - this guy made up his mind a long time ago and he's not about to let the facts confuse him *sigh* I really wonder about people like that.

    • The GPL places restrictions on what you can and cannot do with the software in its own way, and in a way, that makes it non-free. GPL software can be (and is) included with OpenBSD (not sure about others), but its far from the favorite license.

      I'm not saying that the GPL is non-free, I'm just saying that from the POV that BSD projects are to be usable as bases for commercial, closed-source software, the GPL falls short.

      If the BSD OS's could get rid of GPL s/w and replace with equal BSD (or comparable) licensed software, they would do it in a heartbeat. /me hides from RMS
    • The article's point is that the a company can't use GPL'd code in their proprietary products and then charge licensing fees for the use of that software. Since most of the commercial software industry makes its moeny on licensing fees, the article argues that this essentially taking their incentive away from improving the code.

      And with that point I disagree. Very little of the software used today is licensed on a large scale, but those that are (Solaris, Windows, MS Office) are commonly known. The author here is seeing a few trees here and callign them the forrest.

      Instead most software is developed inhouse for inhouse applications (web apps, LOB apps, etc.) and these pieces are not sold on the open market. So in many areas, I believe that there is a financial incentive to take GPL code and improve it, and like with the BSD license, return that improved code to the community (if it is community owned, then the community can support it). The incentive here is not the gain in revenue from licensing fees but rather the cost savings by large-scale group-development, where no one entity is paying for every developer hour.

  • The article forgot to mention SunOS (Score:4, Informative)

    by brokeninside ( 34168 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:08PM (#4346618)
    The article attempts to list the five most famous BSDs, but doesn't mention SunOS (aka Solaris). I'm not too impressed by an article on the history of BSD that doesn't mention SunOS, the Mach kernel (except a brief mention of Darwin), OSF/1, or Digital Unix.

  • Holy crap (Score:5, Funny)

    by theNeophile ( 238938 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:10PM (#4346629)
    Now i know why i don't visit ExtremeTech much.

    What is BSD? If you ask a typical computer "expert," he or she is likely to reply
    Next Page >
    (incorrectly!) that it is "an operating system." The correct answer, however, is more complex than that.
    Next Page >
    BSD is -- among other things -- a culture, a philosophy, and a growing collection of software, most (though not all) of which is available for free and with source code.
    Next Page >
    Here are the origins of BSD and the operating systems it has spawned.
    Next Page >
    BSD stands for "Berkeley Software Distribution," the name first given to the University of California at Berkeley's own toolkit of enhancements for the UNIX operating system.

  • Only one worm? (Score:2, Informative)

    by brokeninside ( 34168 )
    From the article:
    The long BSD tradition of cautious development, extensive peer review, and thorough testing makes them some of the most reliable software ever developed. In fact, as far as anyone knows, only one worm has ever been developed that attacked any of the BSDs.


    The Morris Internet worm that virtually shutdown the Internet attacked SunOS, which is a BSD, and DEC VAX running 4 BSD.

  • an OK article, but a bit biased in favor of fbsd (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MobyTurbo ( 537363 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:16PM (#4346684)
    This article seems to give the impression that FreeBSD is the only one that's not a niche product. Nothing could be further from the truth. NetBSD's attention to portability and "correctness" means that it often has the best-written drivers and is even more stable than FreeBSD, and as of 1.6 it now has a new init system that FreeBSD is going to copy for 5.0. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, lots of things get copied from NetBSD because in line with Berkeley Unix's past it's a research and development oriented operating system.)

    OpenBSD's attention to code audits also bodes well for overall lack of bugs; and its ability to have security features such as encryption of even the swap space makes it useful for paranoid executives or the government; and it's, as the article admits, great for firewalls because of that.

    This article was good for bringing *BSD onto the radar screen of people who otherwise wouldn't have heard of it, but if you read it you give the impression that nobody runs the other BSDs; something that the infamous AC BSD trolls try to accuse, albeit more crudely, all of the BSDs of being.

    • [NetBSD 1.6] now has a new init system that FreeBSD is going to copy for 5.0

      It's already been copied; rc_ng is now the default for -CURRENT.
      • [NetBSD 1.6] now has a new init system that FreeBSD is going to copy for 5.0
        It's already been copied; rc_ng is now the default for -CURRENT.
        True, but FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT is not a release version yet by any stretch of the imagination, it's an open beta-quality and even alpha-quality branch and very much in flux and frequent instability; I was refering to 5.0-RELEASE which hopefully will be ready-for-prime-time. (Of course, there's nothing wrong with having a development branch, the other BSDs and Linux also have this, just pointing that out.)

  • Solaris (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MoonRider ( 31804 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:24PM (#4346742) Homepage
    Solaris is one of the best operating systems around. It has a strong TCP/IP stack with hundreds of options you can tune and an excelent kernel design... most of it's internals came from BSD.

    • The old SunOS was based on BSD. Solaris is based on an SVR4 core, which is what made the transition so painful (different APIs for signal handling, etc.)

  • Misinformation and Absurdity (Score:3, Informative)

    by dh003i ( 203189 ) <dh003i@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:27PM (#4346768) Homepage Journal
    Don't let the title fool you. This article was great. There was, however, one clearly uninformed statement. The GNU GPL does not prevent you from charging other people software based off of GPL'ed code; it mandates that the source code for any modified or improved versions be distributed either free or at no greater than the net cost of distribution.

    Also, nice to know that the judges in our courts are complete morons, as they don't realize that among people in the computer world, UNIX is a generic term.

    We think and speak of BSD, IRIX, AIX, Solaris, Linux etc, as being UNIX OPERATING SYSTEMS. Even some OS' which shouldn't be called UNIX are called UNIX (i.e., Plan9).

    Someone on /. said earlier "trademarks exist to protect the consumer". Yea, my ass they do. Its time we stopped letting corporations divide the language between them.
  • This article was qualified as "informative"? True, it does give much factual information about the history of BSD, it does take quite an editorial stand... and the author calls Linux advocates dogmatic... talk about the pot calling the kettle black...

    Other criticism:
    1) Linux isn't an operating system... true... RMS is preaching as much... GNU/Linux is however an operating system...

    2) "Proponents of Linux tend to take a 'revolutionary' stance, seeing their work as a war to compete with, and destroy, Microsoft and other commercial software vendors." This is a bit of an exaggeration combined with an oversimplification.

    3) "only one security hole that would allow an intruder to break in from the Internet has been discovered in the past 6 years" I'm just guessing, but I'd think this only includes software as part of the BSD operating system, and not third party contributing software... Hell, the Slapper worm is a port of a BSD worm over to the GNU/Linux system...

    4) "Unlike most other operating systems (including most distributions of Linux), FreeBSD is extremely easy to install directly via an Internet connection." Maybe if you go by raw numbers of Linux distros, but I've installed RedHat over the network for years...

    I could go on, but I don't feel like it... I just wish the article could be more neutral and not bash every other operating system out there, including GNU/Linux...

    -jag

  • Darwin 6.0.1 (Score:4, Informative)

    by h0tblack ( 575548 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:33PM (#4346804)
    ..has recently been released [apple.com], this is the massively updated layer beneath OS X 10.2 (aka jaguar aka jagwire). At the moment only the PPC binary installer is available, the x86 version is apparently on it's way, until then there's always the older 1.4.1 x86 [apple.com] version. IMHO it's good that Apple are keeping both the source and binary Darwin distribs up to date. A Whole bunch of the engineers at apple are heavily committed to open-sourcing (and not just those you'd expect like Jordan Hubbard). Using the Darwin Core and something like Fink [sourceforge.net] or DarwinPorts [opendarwin.org] you can end up with a nice and 'free' OS with Xfree86, KDE et al.
    • Just wondering since all of the good desktop parts of OSX are proprietary, would you bother running Darwin if you can't use the OSX desktop.

      Has anyone out there switched from FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD to Darwin? Do you think its better? Why etc.

  • Not an accurate comparison to Linux (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Burdell ( 228580 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:37PM (#4346828)
    But virtually all modern operating systems -- from Windows to BeOS to Linux -- rely on crucial BSD code to run.

    Linux does not "rely on crucial BSD code to run." The Linux IP stack was a clean re-write (in part because at the time, the "free" BSD license was incompatible with the GNU GPL). There are some drivers that are developed cooperatively with FreeBSD and Linux (typically dual licensed under the BSD license and the GPL). AFAIK, the only code in Linux that originated in classic BSD is in a couple of the PPP compression modules, but that's hardly crucial code that is relied upon for operation.

    Unlike most other operating systems (including most distributions of Linux), FreeBSD is extremely easy to install directly via an Internet connection. No CD-ROM is required, though one must download two 1.4 MB floppy disk image files and use them to create bootstrap floppies.

    I only have to download one 1.4 MB floppy disk image file to install Red Hat Linux from the Internet. Does that mean RHL is twice as good? Not really (although it is ;-) ).

  • Why BSD over Linux and History Clarifications (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:39PM (#4346840)
    First, I've used Unix since 1977 and BSD since about 1979 (whenever V3.0 BSD came out.)

    Why is Linux more popular than BSD?

    I think mostly because a useable, free distribution of linux was available first. Although a lot of the BSD code was freely available there was no real distribution you could load and boot for a few crucial years other than BSDi which cost about $1000 (and was very good, but you had to be willing to part with $1000.)

    So, simply: A loadable, bootable, useable Linux was available for free to the general public before the same was available for BSD.

    Some might nitpick about the availability of Jolitz' 386BSD but it was at best a very limited distribution and supported only some specific cpu/bios/disk/etc setups. From almost the start Linux used the BIOS drivers (ok I'm not a x86 internals weenie so might have this worded slightly wrong) which meant you tended to just get lucky if you tried Linux on your off-beat hardware, it'd usually just work.

    Remember also that in the early/mid 90's x86's were much less standardized and you tended to do your own system integration taking a basic system with a motherboard and often adding a video card, a disk card, a disk, a sound card, etc. and all that had to be supported by OS drivers of some sort. Linux was better at that then BSD back then.

    HISTORY:

    What's seriously missing from the article are the specific reasons why BSD gained such fast popularity:

    In the 70's the most popular system for hacking around on was the DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) PDP-11. It was relatively cheap for its day (usually under $100K!) and expandable and mostly maintainable by the sysadmins.

    Unix from Bell Labs and very early BSDs ran on the PDP-11. But it was limited to 16-bits, many systems maxed out with 64KB (yes KB) of memory! Fancier systems could extend that to 128KB, and their rolls-royce model, the PDP-11/70, could handle 2MB but anything beyond 64KB was mostly used like a fast swap disk, you'd load programs and the OS would switch which 64KB (or for some 128KB, 64KB for the program, 64KB for its data) it was running right now.

    Then, around 1978, DEC came out with the VAX (Virtual Address eXtension, of the PDP-11, tho that's more of a historical artifact of a name.)

    The VAX had 32-bits of architecture and could support, well, over 1GB of physical and 4GB of virtual memory, at least in theory tho in those days 16MB of physical was huge super-computer stuff.

    But the virtual memory system was very complicated and DEC released it only with their own proprietary VMS O/S which was kind of like CP/M on steroids (MS/DOS was based on CP/M), with a few additions like the VM support.

    There were some early releases of Unix for the Vax (e.g., System/32 from AT&T) but they didn't support the VM hardware and so were very limited. VAXes cost around $500K, you didn't really want to spend half a million and then not be able to use the main point of the hardware!

    Then Bill Joy (BSD, later one of the Sun founders) in probably one of the greatest virtuoso performances in hacking history added VM support to BSD and a VAX version was released.

    Suddenly every University and research lab had to have a Vax running BSD, particularly by their 4.1 release. 4.2bsd added full TCP/IP support and a much more robust file system written by Kirk McKusick (previously a crash would often corrupt the file system and there was no real fsck so sometimes you'd have to use a kind of interactive file system debugger to fix a partition manually,
    or just try to recreate it from backups,
    ugh, you don't know the horror.)

    DEC came out with the somewhat less expensive VAX 11/750 and even a 730 model (which really, really
    sucked, but better than nothing!) and more and more people at universities & research facilities bought them to run BSD/Unix which, particularly with ethernet and maybe even an Arpanet connection, was just grand, heaven on earth.

    DEC fought tooth and nail against BSD/Unix (any Unix) preferring to push their proprietary VMS OS even if it meant shoving down people's throats (e.g., they loved going to the suits and telling them that if their people run Unix on their $500K VAXes DEC might refuse to fix the hardware if it breaks...FUD.)

    Eventually DEC relented and came out with their own version of Unix for the Vax based mostly on BSD and called it Ultrix.

    But it was too little, too late, by then Sun was eating their lunch with much better Unix on machines that mostly cost well under $100K even in their fancy incarnations. And bitmapped workstations (Sun3/50) could be had for around $5K with disk (or you could run them diskless for less.)

    Sun ran a pretty pure BSD/Unix and then in the late 80's merged it with AT&T's System V (as in five, not vee, there was a I, III, and probably some numbers in between not publically released.)

    AT&T completely fell on its face with Unix coming out with the doomed 3B series of AT&T computers (proprietary CPU) running their SYSV Unix as well as the rebadged Convergent PC7300 which was kind of cool because to my knowledge it's the only machine that had a label on it "Unix PC".

    • Re:Why BSD over Linux and History Clarifications (Score:5, Informative)

      by edhall ( 10025 ) <slashdot@weirdnoise.com> on Friday September 27, 2002 @09:25PM (#4348362) Homepage

      Good grief; someone got it (mostly) right! DEC's hardware was absolutely crucial to Unix's emergence, even though DEC did damn near everything to stop it. I do have a few nits to pick, though, and a bit more info on BSD's contribution (specifically the 1.x and 2.x series which ran on PDP-11 only):

      • PDP-11's supported 256KB of memory early on due to the fact that the UNIBUS had 18 address lines. The PDP-11/70 added another wider bus and so supported more memory, as you say.
      • Although the PDP-11/40 and earlier supported only a single 64KB address space, the PDP-11/45 supported separate Data and Text (executable) spaces. Most Unix installations were 11/45's or 11/70's, and so supported this feature (which lead to the introduction of "shared text" -- separate processes sharing a single copy of executable code).
      • Saying that memory outside of 64KB was used as "fast swap" is inaccurate, since it implies that processes were copied to and from it; in fact, PDP-11's (from the '40 on) had segmentation hardware which allowed that memory to be mapped in without copying.
      • One of the things that BSD added to Unix on PDP-11's was the ability to use its segmentation hardware to map in and out parts of executables. Although the granularity of 8KB segments tended to limit this feature to separate phases of a program, it helped soften the 64/64 barrier a bit on the code side.
      • Shared memory was another feature allowed by the memory hardware that BSD took advantage of.
      • BSD also added a primitive (by later standards) networking capability called, I believe, BerkNET.
      • A number of other features were added as well to PDP-11 BSD Unix along with a lot of performance tuning and enhancement. It wasn't unusual to have sixty people comfortably sharing a PDP-11/70 doing software development and word processing (and, of course, email and messaging).

      Very little of what Berkeley added to PDP-11 Unix survives. This isn't surprising given that a fair amount of it was designed specifically to confront the 16-bit address limitation in some way. It's a bit amusing to hear some similar ideas being discussed today (though more in Linux circles than BSD, I think) for overcoming the 32-bit address limit. (It's also a bit weird to think that if Moore's law continues to hold, I'll probably live to see the same thing happen at 64 bits!)

      The VAX version of BSD (which was developed pretty much separately -- the two overlapped by several years) has direct influence on all BSD's today, of course, and your post pretty covers its development from Unix V32 through Ultrix.

      -Ed

  • The Myth of BSD in Windows (Score:4, Informative)

    by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @03:45PM (#4346887) Homepage
    A long, long time ago, in the State of Washington, a certain company that produces a lot of software needed a TCP/IP stack. Seeing many smaller companies producing TCP/IP stacks, they decided to buy one.

    But when they bought the company out and started examining the code, they found that it was a Regents of Berkeley code. Since they did not want to advertise the BSD operating system, they instead went ahead and wrote a new stack using the knowledge of the old, BSD-based stack as a starting point. They also ported some BSD-derived utilities, which do include the copyright string, to the new Winsock TCP/IP stack.

    But Microsoft never, ever shipped with a non-MS TCP/IP stack. They wrote their own code for Win95 and WinNT because they needed it, and they did not want to advertise the competition.

    Check out this page [google.ca] for more information on this subject.
    • Microsoft's very own SDK contains the Berkeley copyright notice in the following files: WINSOCK.H, WINSOCK2.H, and WS2API.H. Probably done for ease of porting. So why would MS care about the binary only stack if the header files that developers use mention Berkeley?

    • Re:The Myth of BSD in Windows (Score:4, Informative)

      by pumpkin2146 ( 317171 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @04:16PM (#4347094)
      $ uname
      CYGWIN_NT-5.0

      $ pwd /cygdrive/d/winnt/system32

      $ strings ftp.exe | grep University
      @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.

      (and the same for finger.exe, nslookup.exe, rsh.exe and rcp.exe).

      Maybe not in the IP stack ...

      And by the way, I approve of this, it is part of the point of the BSD license. It also means I get a nslookup that works in a somewhat sane manner on Win2k, instead of MS not shipping a tool to do that at all (which is what would have happened if it had taken developer time).

      How long would MacOS X have taken if it wasn't for a preexisting BSD userland ?
  • But what can we expect when we do plenty of BSD-bashing and run plenty of ridiculous "BSD is dying" articles?

    This intense rivalry between the BSD and Linux communities is something that baffles me, since both basically want the same goals -- freedom for users, excellent software -- but go about doing it in different ways.

    From my reasoning, people who GPL their programs are extremely worried about the possibility of the "public" project dying off, and a corporate project which doesn't care about freedom taking over; they also want to draw programs out into the open, hence the requirement that any modifications or programs based on a GPL'ed program be GPL'ed. People who use the BSD license just want to let others use their code for whatever purpose, so long as the original code is revealed; they obviously prefer the BSD license, and hope that others will be convinced to license their BSD-license-based software under teh BSD license, but do not force the issue, as does the GPL. The GPL is a slightly more aggressive approach.

    Both camps are also concerned with the excellence of their products, though that concern manifests itself in different ways. While OpenBSD and NetBSD tend to focus on security and portability, respectively (and both of them on stablity), Linux' tend to focus more on performance, features, and ease of use. Of course, you can't speak for all of the Linux' as one. Debian and Slackware have a pretty rounded effort regarding security, stability, performance, and features, despite being somewhat difficult in ease of use. Alternatively, distributions like Mandrake and Corel tend to focus hardly on ease of use, while RedHat and Suse focus on ease of use and stability.

    There is no absolute right or wrong. Different things are better for different users, depending on their technical needs and their politics.

    Ultimately, all OSS / FS communities benefit from one another, particularly Linux and BSD, which have benefitted greatly from eachother. Linux has gained much in terms of hard technical details from BSD; conversely, BSD has benefitted from Linux being in the spotlight, as there are more applications for Linux, which means more apps that may run under BSD.

    For me, the GPL and Debian are my license and OS of choice. I choose Linux over BSD because I'm a personal user and I need driver support for things like graphics cards from Nvidia and ATI; Debian because, among the Linux', it does tend to be the most stable and steadfast, with excellent quality-control.

    For other people, something else is best. For those that love having absolute control, Slackware is best. For those who just want something that's overall pretty well rounded, RedHat, Caldera, Suse, etc are the way to go. For those who want something that focuses most on ease of use, Mandrake or Corel are good options. Other people will want a BSD OS. For those for whom security is a big issue, OpenBSD is the one of choice; for the person who needs something portable, NetBSD; for the all-around power-user, FreeBSD. Of course, that's just my opinion.
    • This intense rivalry between the BSD and Linux communities is something that baffles me...

      They're all still people. Having -- and sharing -- apparently noble goals doesn't seem to make people any less (or more) petty and egotistical.

    • I agree that all this GNU/Linux and BSD bashing is slightly insane. Some GNU/Linux users seem to feel the need to tell everyone that their OS is every bit as secure and stable as the BSDs, and likewise BSD users seem to feel the need to tell everyone that their OS is every bit as powerful and feature laden as GNU/Linux. Windows users try to impress both camps :)

      In the middle of these wars over people's insecurity about their OS, they mix in silly arguments over licensing, design philosophies and any other issues they might want to raise, usually in a very inaccurate manner. For example:

      Linux, by itself, is not a complete operating system -- it's the "kernel" of the operating system....

      The author is either backing the FSF by saying we should call it all GNU/Linux, or trying to imply that because we talk about "linux" when we mean a full GNU/Linux distribution, we're really comparing the Linux kernel to a whole BSD system.

      The article is riddled with other such nonsense. I'm surprised it got published, its really more of a poor opinion piece. In the end it does tell you a fair bit about BSD, but far less than it could, and all of it is tainted by inaccurate boastings and attacks.

  • Article was very biased (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Friday September 27, 2002 @04:02PM (#4347017)
    .. towards BSD and against Linux.

    The truth is that BSD vs. Linux matters very little. They are both free software, and can mostly run the same apps.

    What matters are the apps. As long as you have Apache, Postgresql, openssl etc. it matters little wether or not the core is Linux or BSD.

    When you have KDE, GNOME and bash it matters very little that the core is BSD instead of Linux or vica versa.

    Based on this, people should be able to choose the OS on purely technical reasons. Linux is better for some things, BSD is better for others.

    Frankly I don't care much for the whole BSD vs. Linux "war". If one of them "takes over the world" I'll be happy.
  • Around the same time, Linux surfaced. Based on the Minix kernel written by computer science professor Andrew Tannenbaum, and unencumbered by the spectre of a lawsuit, Linux began to gain momentum and became the best known freely redistributable UNIX-like operating system.

    The kernel architecture of Minux and Linux are totally different.Minux like NT is based on a microkernel. Linux definetly isn't. Tanenbaum himself stated this during his famous Linux is obsolete [educ.umu.se] rant.

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