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All of the BSDs currently have excellent package-management systems that can elegantly handle both binary and source packages. pkgsrc in particular is a really nice system---further, it has the advantage of not being tied to one OS. Although it is developed primarily for NetBSD, it can be used from any of the other BSDs, Linux, several Unices, and even Windows (with Internix, i.e. Windows Services for Unix).

In fact, it's definitely worth checking NetBSD out; the 2.x line has been really interesting, and development is continuing to move forward at a rapid pace. If you're on a single-processor system, it's arguably one of the best-performing OSes available at the moment, and it in general will work. Add that to the fact that you could probably port it to your toaster if you were dedicated enough, and it's worth giving serious consideration to as an alternative to Debian, or indeed anything else.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

• FreeBSD doners gallery
• NetBSD doners gallery
• ActiveState pays several developers to work full-time on PHP, Python and Tcl, and a lot of their work goes into the core distributions not just ActiveState's proprietary development environments.

None of these products in under copyleft. Enlightened self-interest is more effective than a big stick.

Do you have OS X currently installed? yaboot? If so, chroot into the drive from OS X and install -- this might be tricky, but probably doable. Don't let the installer mess around with OpenFirmware. Then mess around with the yaboot.conf to make a new bootload item. I suspect that getting the right address requires a trip into OpenFirmware. There a couple of other great OpenFirmware references, but I can't seem to find any. I'll see what I can find later. Anyway, the basic idea is to get yaboot to take over bootloading duties, and make it aware of the kernel on your firewire drive. I have no idea if this will work, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

Another option would be to set up a "yaboot" file on your firewire drive like linux install discs have. Then you can just use OpenFirmware to boot the bootloader. This would be more portable since you could run linux on any mac with OF, but would be less convenient since you'd have to go into OF everytime you wanted to boot. Perhaps a combination of the two techniques would work (having a global yaboot installed on your mac so you wouldn't need OF, but also having yaboot on your firewire drive so you could boot elsewhere without touching the local disk).

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Are Linux and Free/OpenBSD the only real options now?

I don't know if you left it out on purpose or merely forgot to add it to your list, and I hardly ever use it, but NetBSD is a damn fine BSD variant too. It just doesn't get the press it deserves, focus seems to be on Linux and Free/OpenBSD mainly.

Well, then there's The Hurd, but it's barely usable. So, yes, I guess those are the only real options now. :)

This (on page 2 of the article):

Linux remains a diverse, highly scalable, and powerful operating system, the only one which has been able to hop the current gap between PowerPC and x86

.. is nonsense.

The NetBSD packages collection works on OpenBSD, among a host of other operating systems.

Not yet. NetBSD, though, runs great!

NetBSD likewise. You could actually do a complete cross-compile of amd64 2 years ago.

Can you compile a complete Gentoo for a slower alpha on a fast dual i386 box? Real question here.

How about an orange flag?

- Hubert

Uhm, what? You're missing a ton of platforms. It also seems that some of those which you list netbsd as not supporting may actually be supported by it.

Here's the COMPLETE list: acorn26 acorn32 algor alpha amd64 amiga amigappc arc arm32 atari bebox cats cesfic cobalt dreamcast evbarm evbmips evbppc evbsh3 evbsh5 hp300 hp700 hpcarm hpcmips hpcsh i386 iyonix luna68k mac68k macppc mipsco mmeye mvme68k mvmeppc netwinder news68k newsmips next68k ofppc pc532 playstation2 pmax pmppc prep sandpoint sbmips sgimips shark sparc sparc64 sun2 sun3 vax x68k xen

http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/

If you're going to compile a list, at least get it right. It seems like you just decided to group together incompatible architectures exclusively on the basis that they have the same cpu.

In fact, you even grouped some later generation cpus with earlier ones that aren't compatible (arm vs. strongarm). You can't put ppc, mips, arm, m68k and so forth under the same classification, since there are many different architectures.

Documentation is very easy to find and readily available for the BSDs:

NetBSD packages
OpenBSD packages
FreeBSD packages

DragonFly uses FreeBSDs ports at this time as per the FAQ

Also see FreshPorts

How do you figure that? Maybe it used to be true, and it is certainly one of NetBSD's goals, but it's simply not true that NetBSD runs on more systems than Linux. NetBSD gives this impression by listing multiple "ports" for a single CPU architecture.

In fact, NetBSD supports 17 different types of CPUs, some of which are just variations of the other CPUs. It's difficult to find a complete list, but Linux supports at least 22 different system architectures according to this article, and many more of them are useful than the NetBSD ports. Not to mention the much wider variety of peripherals and interface cards that Linux supports than any of the BSDs support.

You're living in a different reality than the rest of us, friend. There are many, many user applications out there that work only on Linux, some of which will never be ported to BSD because they are commercial products. Like Maya, for instance, the software that is used for most computer animation today. Even some open source software runs so poorly on BSD that it's not worth using -- like MySQL. The fact is that even if these problems are mostly because of Linux's greater popularity and not technical, Linux is much better as a general purpose OS.

A lot of people really prefer donating money to buying CDs, even if the project has a lot of value to them. I hear this a lot about OpenBSD, where a lot of supporters will make an FTP download and donate $50 rather than buy the CD simply because it's more convient for them.

At any rate, I don't see how this would help. Presumably they aren't going to stop letting you download it for free. In that case, buying a copy is really not very different to just downloading it and donating some money - which is really all they're asking for now.

Of course, there are a lot of places that do sell NetBSD CDs for those without the bandwidth to just get it themselves, and I would suppose those places contribute some of the profits to the project. There's also the NetBSD store (although unfortunately the stuff there just isn't that flash)

- Hubert

1. The script is part of NetBSD.
2. http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/regress/ is supposedly used for regression testing. Ask a developer, I'm just a user :)

...the cross-platform, cross-hardware part?

It's magic! A single script and I can build a complete operating system for a big-endian 64bit architecture on a 32bit little-endian architecture, or any of the other 48 supported archs. More than that, I can build a complete NetBSD for any arch on any halfway POSIXish system.

build.sh bootstraps its own contained build utils (compiler, binutils et al) and builds the system with that. You can even build the complete system as non-root and get tarballs that you can use to install a complete system.

To think that my weak SPARCstation 2 should build its own system would be madness. Instead, I just run build.sh -m sparc distribution on a dumb, fast i386 box and have a world in an hour instead of week(s).

Oh, and NetBSD "feels" the same on any arch, no administration nightmare, no matter what arch you run it on.

Just FYI.

It looks like it belongs at home in one of these: - something that legitimately needs multiple 6" blowers for cooling.

I'm really torn about what to think of Debian.
On one hand, I really like the concept--that they keep Linux available on a wide range of architectures

Everytime somebody likes to say that about Debian, I like to remind them the NetBSD folks support an acorn26 acorn32 algor alpha amd64 amiga amigappc arc arm32 atari bebox cats cesfic cobalt dreamcast evbarm evbmips evbppc evbsh3 evbsh5 hp300 hp700 hpcarm hpcmips hpcsh i386 iyonix luna68k mac68k macppc mipsco mmeye mvme68k mvmeppc netwinder news68k newsmips next68k ofppc pc532 playstation2 pmax pmppc prep sandpoint sbmips sgimips shark sparc sparc64 sun2 sun3 vax x68k xen impressive array of platforms, and at the same time hack userland, kernel and protocols. While Debian developers mostly package upstream stuff.

Great, and how will this change "The Layman" idea of ip4 vs. ip6 that I laid out?

I'm pretty good with dealing with large numbers; I can't begin to imagine what a sextillion of anything will look like.

You get points for being technically accurate, but lose the game for actually achieving the objective, which is telling him what it is. 128 bit vs. 32 bit? What's that? How does this affect him? Don't add unnecessary bit of info when you're trying to build up the big picture.

And if you want to get picky about the technical aspect, you should at least get it right, it's three hundred forty undecillion addresses.

source: http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/network/ipv6/# diff_ipv4

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Yes.

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

However, from just trying to install software on a Solaris box I can tell you, I don't like it one bit. When I install software, I don't want to have to manually copy files and go in and edit config files myself. If this was 1980 I wouldn't mind.

Blastwave
NetBSD pkgsrc
Sun Freeware

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Why yet another distribution when everyone's favourite operating system already works, even on Xen - ``Of course it runs NetBSD!'' :)

Some links:
* What does Xen look like - a screenshot:
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/hubertf-xe n.png
* Installation:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/howto.html
* General information on NetBSD/Xen:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/
* Live CD with Debian, NetBSD and FreeBSD:
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html#20050421_004 1
* Benchmarking:
http://www.iki.fi/kuparine/comp/xendom0/xendom0.ht ml

- Hubert

Why yet another distribution when everyone's favourite operating system already works, even on Xen - ``Of course it runs NetBSD!'' :)

Some links:
* What does Xen look like - a screenshot:
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/hubertf-xe n.png
* Installation:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/howto.html
* General information on NetBSD/Xen:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/
* Live CD with Debian, NetBSD and FreeBSD:
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html#20050421_004 1
* Benchmarking:
http://www.iki.fi/kuparine/comp/xendom0/xendom0.ht ml

- Hubert

Why yet another distribution when everyone's favourite operating system already works, even on Xen - ``Of course it runs NetBSD!'' :)

Some links:
* What does Xen look like - a screenshot:
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/hubertf-xe n.png
* Installation:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/howto.html
* General information on NetBSD/Xen:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/
* Live CD with Debian, NetBSD and FreeBSD:
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html#20050421_004 1
* Benchmarking:
http://www.iki.fi/kuparine/comp/xendom0/xendom0.ht ml

- Hubert

This is an AWESOME bittorrent site! Wow!

...forgotten, perhaps, regarding Windows since the Microsoft / DEC Alliance days. But I've been running NetBSD's pkgsrc on a fully 64-bit OS for many years now (not to mention some others). In the OSS world, at least, 64 bit issues have been addressed for some time now.

There is the occasional badly-behaved audio or video application, coded originally on 32-bit x86 Linux, that must be hammered into shape. But it happens quickly enough that my Alpha is, and has been for years, a fully modern 64-bit desktop OS.

...forgotten, perhaps, regarding Windows since the Microsoft / DEC Alliance days. But I've been running NetBSD's pkgsrc on a fully 64-bit OS for many years now (not to mention some others). In the OSS world, at least, 64 bit issues have been addressed for some time now.

There is the occasional badly-behaved audio or video application, coded originally on 32-bit x86 Linux, that must be hammered into shape. But it happens quickly enough that my Alpha is, and has been for years, a fully modern 64-bit desktop OS.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Well, I knew Linux will run on a badger and that NetBSD will run on a toaster, but a Cat? Bravo, Theo, you've done it again!

This statement ("cannot use a HFS+ file system for pkgsrc") is obsolete. Please see

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-bugs/2004/07/0 8/0001.html

hmmm... from netbsd.org:

You cannot use a HFS+ file system for pkgsrc, because pkgsrc currently requires the filesystem to be case-sensitive, and HFS+ is not.

Sounds like being superior comes at a price...

I've been using pkgsrc on OS X for years now, since 10.2. Works great, any occasional errors are cleared up quickly after a post to the mailing list. But I'm a NetBSD guy, so there's my bias.

http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/pkgsrc/

Pkgsrc is superior to Fink, for certain-- I'm not familiar with Darwinports and how it stacks up. It's just a different brand of the same strawberry ice cream, I imagine.

Mmm... ice cream. I installed QT just yesterday (so I can compile TyEditor) by simply typing 'make update'... No fuss, no muss.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

1. NetBSD - Free, business-friendly open source operating system, donate at paypal@NetBSD.org
2. g4u - Harddisk image cloning for PCs, donate at paypal@feyrer.de

"...and they run on more hardware than enybody else."

How many open-source graphics packages are there? One (Gimp).

Actually there are two others that turned up in a simple google:

http://www.inkscape.org/
http://www.sodipodi.com/

Without OSX and Windows, there is only one operating system left.

There are in fact several open source OS's besides linux, some based on unix some not:

http://www.reactos.com/
http://www.freedos.org/
http://www.netbsd.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/
http://www.freebsd.org/

It is true that certain packages tend to dominate if they are clearly better than the others (such as Gimp or Apache) However in some areas their is still no clear 'winner' such as the battle between KDE/Gnome. This is just natural evolution in progress.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

For the longer term:

I would like to see FreeBSD and DragonflyBSD SMP strategies mature to the point of leveling off performance wise and then see OpenBSD work towards integrating the best SMP system. Hopefully their current SMP efforts lay a foundation which can be built on with either of these systems, as opposed to perhaps becoming a big mistake that would have to be backed out of. With dual-cores becoming the norm soon (Intel, AMD, IBM970 and there is even already dual-core G4's), SMP is going to become a very big issue.

On an unrelated note, I would really like to see the dual-core G4's, with their REAL full bandwidth on-chip DDR RAM controllers get put into the next round of Apple Powerbooks. Apple? Are you listening? I have cash on standby, waiting to buy an Apple Powerbook with at least 2GB DDR RAM which is accessible to the CPU at the full DDR RAM speed. Until you deliver that or a G5 Powerbook, I will wait...

Don't underestimate NetBSD's top-flight support for Xen, which has supported domain0 for Xen 1.2 since April of 2004, and for Xen 2.0 since January 2005.

http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/howto.html

Please see "Installing NetBSD as domain0".

Don't forget OpenBSD, NetBSD, or DragonFly BSD.

Actually, smartass, I DID test it thoroughly, and (in 2.6.11, and continuing to 2.6.12-rc2 - no other kernels tried) it consistently fails to connect the MSN protocol (any client) and POP3, and some HTTP seems to behave badly but mostly okay. It IS a bug in Linux because none of the BSDs exhibit this, and it is also a bug that isn't fixed in 2.6.12-rc2 despite numerous changes to IPSec (and related) components.

Well I use POP3 and HTTP over ipsec and it is fine. So it is likely that you are doing something wrong.

Where is your bug report?

When you show me a BSD exposing a significant security hole (like the Linux signal exploit) or breaking long-standing network functionality (IPSec, packet filtering, etc.), then I might consider them somewhere close to buggy, but flawed hardware support is nothing compared to the breakages Linux experiences.

You really have no idea about software development, do you? You honestly think BSDs have no bugs? You are a sad, stupid idiot.

I've looked up your posting history and you are a stupid trolling idiot who wouldn't know a kernel if it kicked him up the anus. You consistently say stupid and incorrect things and try to pass them off as fact. I'm having nothing more to do with the likes of you.

A Linux advocate I know said, and I quote directly, "I've had some corker problems on GNU/Linux-based systems that can only be attributed to poor development and testing, and implementing the same thing on OpenBSD had no issues at all. First thing that comes to mind as indicative of the difference in quality between the GNU/Linux and BSD's, is PAM vs BSDAuth.."

A BSD advocate I know recently said (quote) "First thing that comes to mind for me is that Linux happens to beat all the BSDs at their own game. It is faster and far more scalable than FreeBSD, it is more portable than NetBSD, and it has advanced security infrastructure that OpenBSD can't match."

Honestly, it's no mystery and nothing new at all. Linux does not get tested. Shit, are you even listening to kernel devs? They've decided NOT to do any quality assurance, leaving vendors up to the task of testing and bug fixing (hint: they don't do a good job either). Find THAT kind of philosophy in any BSD...

Err, actually if you had any idea you would know that they do plenty of quality assurance and follow a good release process. Just because it doesn't exactly match what you small minded BSD zealots are used to, doesn't mean it is wrong. The various BSDs are far more comparable to Linux distributions than the Linux kernel itself.

Actually, smartass, I DID test it thoroughly, and (in 2.6.11, and continuing to 2.6.12-rc2 - no other kernels tried) it consistently fails to connect the MSN protocol (any client) and POP3, and some HTTP seems to behave badly but mostly okay. It IS a bug in Linux because none of the BSDs exhibit this, and it is also a bug that isn't fixed in 2.6.12-rc2 despite numerous changes to IPSec (and related) components.

Well I use POP3 and HTTP over ipsec and it is fine. So it is likely that you are doing something wrong.

Where is your bug report?

When you show me a BSD exposing a significant security hole (like the Linux signal exploit) or breaking long-standing network functionality (IPSec, packet filtering, etc.), then I might consider them somewhere close to buggy, but flawed hardware support is nothing compared to the breakages Linux experiences.

You really have no idea about software development, do you? You honestly think BSDs have no bugs? You are a sad, stupid idiot.

I've looked up your posting history and you are a stupid trolling idiot who wouldn't know a kernel if it kicked him up the anus. You consistently say stupid and incorrect things and try to pass them off as fact. I'm having nothing more to do with the likes of you.

A Linux advocate I know said, and I quote directly, "I've had some corker problems on GNU/Linux-based systems that can only be attributed to poor development and testing, and implementing the same thing on OpenBSD had no issues at all. First thing that comes to mind as indicative of the difference in quality between the GNU/Linux and BSD's, is PAM vs BSDAuth.."

A BSD advocate I know recently said (quote) "First thing that comes to mind for me is that Linux happens to beat all the BSDs at their own game. It is faster and far more scalable than FreeBSD, it is more portable than NetBSD, and it has advanced security infrastructure that OpenBSD can't match."

Honestly, it's no mystery and nothing new at all. Linux does not get tested. Shit, are you even listening to kernel devs? They've decided NOT to do any quality assurance, leaving vendors up to the task of testing and bug fixing (hint: they don't do a good job either). Find THAT kind of philosophy in any BSD...

Err, actually if you had any idea you would know that they do plenty of quality assurance and follow a good release process. Just because it doesn't exactly match what you small minded BSD zealots are used to, doesn't mean it is wrong. The various BSDs are far more comparable to Linux distributions than the Linux kernel itself.