Hi PMB,
nice essay about the BSD branches
, if i may add some things if you don't mind:
- there are 4 BSD's, don't leave out the BSDI, yet commercial it's a BSD, not soley FreeBSD with a different License.
- the license is the biggest difference between FreeBSD and GNU (inkluding Linux): GNU enforces the GPL (i.e. all resulting codes is gpl and must be publish free of charge, no linking to GPL libs for non-gpl apps) where as FreeBSD codes is free! no naggles, i can take it, modifiy it, compile it and sell it, and thats it the biggest point for FreeBSD
- NetBSD is a nice multiplatform stuff, but as important as irix
[my Amiga won't serve anything real]
-OpenBSD lacks "personal trust", allthoug it has the bests concepts it shows too many problems in realisation, this is the problem of reinwenting the wheel to often. it is save, but for 2 reasons:it is a fixed default install, linux is just a kernel second it lacks allmos any usabilit. and not to underestimate for a volunteer suported development: Mr DeRaadt is simply not a "communicative" person
- my mind remebers the AT&T part slightly different: the university developed a public domain unix, to save license cost from AT&T, which also had stopped active development and only cashed in on source licenses from customers who needed to fix their mainframe servers using the AT&T source.
this also lead to a court trial AT&T vs. BSD which took a long time, during which the BSD source was semi public and a lot of students started to rewrite the tools AT&T claimed to have copyrights on. basicaly the court hearing resulted in free replacements, and in the US all public finaced software once was public domain, with source in this case.
at the point the bsd unix was starting to get rid of most big license issues,AT&T and the Regents from the Unversity of Berkley made a strange deal which lead to the fact that the Regent can allow people to use AT&T copyrighted code without further notice and restriction, but this only applies to that 4.4lite release. The birth of FreeBSD, the only had to rewrite the rest where of to go with a real free OS.
-FreeBSD is the best of breeds in programm execution, no question about that. It has no competitor for generall I/O performance on standard hardware. just imagine the world biggest FTP site (ftp.cdrom.com) runs FBSD, and some years ago they had to switch hardware, because the cpu could not address enough ram for the database
, the 2xPPro200 could only handle 4GB of memory range.
- oh and the driver stuff for linux, well if you have a HW list on a static html page, thats good for selecting server hardware, but for real life operating need's you need linux, it's 20% drivers (the ones in the kernel, not marked experimental) which are mature outnumber any other free operating systems.
but nothing you wrote is wrong
