Overview of the BSDs 476
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.'"
BSD (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:BSD (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not about the technology, but about the marketing, the timing, and the media's embrace.
Re:BSD (Score:5, Interesting)
-Craig
Re:BSD (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
"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)
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.
Re:BSD (Score:2)
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)
BSD may not be as fool-proof as Linux.. it requires a brain to operate. My OpenBSD firewalls can show you how mature it is, with their only downtime being 5minutes to throw on the latest release.
Re:BSD (Score:2)
It seems that the 1394 controller is supported in NetBSD-current if not 1.6, but not the Audigy to which it is attached. If I could use the Audigy in NetBSD or FreeBSD I'd dump Linux in a second.
Re:BSD (Score:2)
Not exactly a "device", but FreeBSD is still lacking journaling filesystems. On the other hand, several vendors are working on them simultaneously for linux-based systems: IBM, SGI, and Reiser. This is outside of the "core" journaling filesystem, ext3.
I can't comment on OpenBSD -- I don't use it and it doesn't have the same kernel as FreeBSD. But that's probably part of the device driver problem -- each BSD has it's own kernel. Not to mention that the BSD folks have heavy (IMO unnecessary) overlap with the GNU project.
-Paul Komarek
Re:BSD (Score:2)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22790&cid=2
at the time this was posted red hat 6.2 had trouble running oracle 8i for more than 50 days straight
Re:BSD (Score:4, Insightful)
* Linux got popular, so a lot of people wrote drivers for it.
* System limits have significant advantages, especially in the server setting where a box will server a well-defined role with things like # of processes, etc. staying relatively constant. They allow for more efficient memory layout and fewer runtime calculations. I think they are still there because they still have advantages in some cases -- and these are the cases where people will choose BSD over Linux. In the cases where this is a disadvantage, go ahead and use Linux if you want to (although so far I've never really had a problem with the limits). In fact, a couple of times, they've saved me when I made som programming errors and dropped the equivalent of a fork() bomb on my machine. The limits prevented the bad program from monopolizing all resources, and I was able to terminate my buggy program.
* Userland -- you may have a point. I haven't looked into it all that much. But again, this might be a chicken-and-egg thing. Linux's userland developed because of the community and not vice-versa.
* IPv6 problems -- I hadn't heard about that. I'm sure it will be fixed soon enough.
* Crashing -- I think everything crashes on some platforms that don't have properly written drivers. I've got a FreeBSD server that only comes down on power failures and kernel upgrades. By now, I'm pretty confident that it is bulletproof. I'm sure different distributions have different characteristics, just as different Linux versions and distros do. But you can get FreeBSD to be as stable as anyone needs. Go to NetCraft and see longest uptimes. You have to go down to #20 before you get to one that isn't BSD.
And besides -- the daemon in sneakers is cool
Re:BSD (Score:4, Insightful)
It's whatever floats your boat. GNU has historically extended the classic UNIX utilities to the nth degree, while BSD has been content to replicate the classic UNIX utilities (in a lot of cases, the BSD utilities ARE the classic UNIX utilities). It's the difference between "give them enough rope to hang themselves" and "K.I.S.S".
Neither way is wrong, so neither way is evidence of superiority.
Re:BSD (Score:4, Insightful)
Another example, of which I actually have both versions is make. GNU has added a whole stack of new functionality and stuff to its version of make. There's nothing wrong with it, but it ain't standard. The reason I have two versions of make installed is that there's a heck of a lot of software that implicitly assumes GNU make is standard. A significant fraction of the ports specify GNU make as a dependency precisely because of this.
The biggest surprise a Linuxite in BSDland will encounter is that a lot of what they thought was standard UNIX was really GNU. Some of these "linuxisms" are really basic, like shell scripts with the heading #!/bin/sh that only work with bash, to the more obscure, like why ldconfig doesn't behave the way you think it should.
Re:BSD (Score:4, Insightful)
News works like this
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
Re:BSD (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Friends don't let friends drink and dual-boot.
Re:BSD (Score:2, Troll)
Re:BSD (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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.
Re:BSD (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:BSD (Score:2, Interesting)
I did try FreeBSD on a desktop, and no, it's not a very fast-paced OS for games or anything. But then again, if I want games, I'll buy a PS2 but that's just me I guess. I use my FreeBSD desktop now for basic office work, and to be able to test new stuff locally before deploying anything.
My point is that if you want to know where everything goes, BSD is great, Slackware Linux too, but that's the ONLY Linux I know that works like this. Admitted, I haven't tried Gentoo yet but portage sounds good.
Also I used to run a server on SuSE 7.3 because I needed it set up very quickly and indeed, nothing beats a GUI setup when it comes to quickly setting up. Fire and forget, so to say. But man, was I sorry!!
The network card kept failing consistently without showing anything in logs. Network card fried?? Surprisingly, no! I decided to take the whole thing down, install *BSD, and it's now been running solidly ever since 4.6.2 was made a RELEASE. I've installed about 25 different BSD servers overtime during the past year and NONE of them required a reboot for any reason other than planned upgrades or hardware failure and some of those take LOTS of punishment 24/7.
I wish I could say the same about my Linux experiences, and I actually did try many times ever since RedHat 6.0 came out.
Know what you want, find the best tool for the job, and learn how to use it. The best desktop OS is a BSD anyway, but doesn't run on x86. I'll switch as soon as my Athlon 1100 gets really obsolete!
Just my two 0,01
Re:BSD (Score:2)
Getting Started with OpenBSD... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Getting Started with OpenBSD... (Score:2)
Re: sort of offtopic (Score:2)
What? (Score:2)
But I thought OSX wasn't considered a *nix [freshmeat.net]...
Re:What? (Score:2)
Its UNIX, pretty-itized!!!
Re:What? (Score:2)
The author of that article was on crack (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:The author of that article was on crack (Score:2)
OS X is as "Unix" as Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:OS X is as "Unix" as Linux (Score:2)
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:
/etc overriding the entries in the other nameservice (nis, in this case).
passwd: files nis
group: files nis
and you will have entries in
Incidentally, glibc (used by every Linux distribution that I care about for a desktop or server) has copied this mechanism.
Re:OS X is as "Unix" as Linux (Score:2)
>>>>>>>>>>>
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
Re:OS X is as "Unix" as Linux (Score:2)
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...
Re:OS X is as "Unix" as Linux (Score:2)
>>>>>>>
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.
Re:OS X is as "Unix" as Linux (Score:2, Informative)
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)
Re:OpenBSD... (Score:2, Informative)
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)
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?
Re:GPL isn't 'free'? (Score:2)
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.
Re:GPL isn't 'free'? (Score:2)
When Ballmer or whoever said the GPL was anti-American, I just had to laugh. Look at the BSD licence
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.
Re:GPL isn't 'free'? (Score:2)
Re:GPL isn't 'free'? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
first generation vs. multi generation freedom (Score:2)
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)
"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."
Brett Glass! (Score:2)
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.
Re:GPL isn't 'free'? (Score:2)
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.
I don't think you get the article's point (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:GPL isn't 'free'? (Score:2, Insightful)
When you create an application:
So, under my logic, there are really no freedom violations at all with the GPL.
--
Now that I think about it, Mr. Stallman is not that crazy after all.
Re:GPL isn't 'free'? (Score:2)
I don't think that is correct. I seem to recall some project or other moving away from GPL at a version change. If the author retains copyright to the work as a whole, which the FSF suggests to do, the author can change from GPL2 to GPL3 or to BSD, etc.
What happens is that the earlier version (and anyone's mods to that version) remain under the GPL, but any derivitives of the later version would be under the new licence.
I think this falls under the same philosophy in which PERL is released under both BSD and GPL, take your pick.
The article forgot to mention SunOS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The article forgot to mention SunOS (Score:5, Informative)
SunOS version's 4.x and below were derived from BSD.
SunOS version 5.X and Solaris are based on SVR5.
Holy crap (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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.
Re:Holy crap (Score:2)
Re:Holy crap (Score:2)
Only one worm? (Score:2, Informative)
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)
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.
Re:an OK article, but a bit biased in favor of fbs (Score:3, Informative)
It's already been copied; rc_ng is now the default for -CURRENT.
Re:an OK article, but a bit biased in favor of fbs (Score:2)
Solaris (Score:3, Insightful)
You're thinking of SunOS (Score:2)
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.)
Re:You're thinking of SunOS (Score:2)
Misinformation and Absurdity (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Misinformation and Absurdity (Score:2)
You shouldn't have to pay money to be verified as being compliant with a certain standard, not anything beyond the cost of verification anyways; and don't tell me it would cost more to verify than BSD & Linux projects can affort.
A bit of Linux bashing? (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
Any prefer Darwin over the other BSD's? (Score:2)
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)
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.
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 ;-) ).
Re:Not an accurate comparison to Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Current versions of BSD use GCC. However, BSD was originally developed using another compiler (derived from Steve Johnson's PCC) and if someone wanted to spend the time, one of the BSDs could be moved to another compiler today. However, zealotry aside, there is no reason to do so at this point; The BSDs use GCC because it is the best free compiler available for the job. But the fact that BSD was already fairly mature before it started using any GNU software distinguished it from Linux, which was developed almost from the beginning with GCC and other GNU tools.
Why BSD over Linux and History Clarifications (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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):
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.
The Myth of BSD in Windows (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:The Myth of BSD in Windows (huh?) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Myth of BSD in Windows (Score:4, Informative)
CYGWIN_NT-5.0
$ pwd
$ 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 ?
Re:The Myth of BSD in Windows (Score:3, Informative)
Good article, alot of Linux-bashing though (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good article, alot of Linux-bashing though (Score:2)
They're all still people. Having -- and sharing -- apparently noble goals doesn't seem to make people any less (or more) petty and egotistical.
Re:Good article, alot of Linux-bashing though (Score:2)
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)
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.
One noticable flaw... (Score:2)
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.
Re:One noticable flaw... (Score:3, Informative)
The exact words of Andrew Tanenbaum.....
Re:Microsoft's Monopoly again... (Score:3, Funny)
Well, him and tcc.
Re:Just a minute, there... (Score:2)
Re:Just a minute, there... (Score:2)
Not all of them, but it does come with a number of them, not least of all the compiler [freebsd.org]
OTOH, every major distribution comes with pieces of BSD, too.
Re:So which is it? (Score:2)
Re:right tool for the job (Score:2, Funny)
Re:right tool for the job (Score:2)
Re:Just Curious (Score:2, Funny)
Do you shut your eyes when you drive through bad neighborhoods, too?
You don't know what you're missing.
-DDT
Re:Mistaken? (Score:2)
The more packaging, wrapping, manuals and glitz you take away from a Redhat box, the more and more the market price approaches that of a blank CD. Set up a stack of Redhat CDs, sans boxes, at the local fleamarket and see how much they're really worth.
Re:Mistaken? (Score:2)
Re:OMG BSD WINS!!!!! (Score:2)
Re:OMG BSD WINS!!!!! (Score:2)
Re:OT: What if I want BSD for my desktop (Score:4, Informative)
Ports are environment and set of patches for clean compiling and installation on a system. Packages are already compiled ports. Today's FreeBSD ports' count is 7523. You just "make install" it. It automatically download source, patch it, compile and install. Packages could be installed from the Internet. Fire up "pkg_add -r XXXX" and XXXX package will be downloaded and installed.
The ports list (FreeBSD) is here http://www.freebsd.org/ports
Almost everything written for Unix or Linux which comes with source runs recompiled on BSDs. Allmost everything compiled on Linux could be run in emulator (Oracle for example, or commercial games ). And there is Wine for it as well.
As for NVidia cards there's support up to 2D and NVidia going to release native 3D drivers for FreeBSD.
USB stack is same on BSD's and support is good. Take a look at supported hardware on recent releases - I suppose you interested in Intel platform ;)3 86.html
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.6.2R/hardware-i
http://www.openbsd.org/i386.html
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/i386/hardware.html
I'd suggest you to try FreeBSD, as more polished and more i386-oriented. OpenBSD and NetBSD have other things in focus.