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Common Misconceptions About BSD
BSD Today carries an editorial rant on the misinformation that Tucows has on their BSD Section. The author wants to clear up the many misconceptions that Tucows seems to have about BSD now that they are distributing software for it. It talks specifically about licensing issues and availability.
And if any of that were true, you wouldn't be posting as AC.
(8-DCS)
The problem is they never pre-order enough cd's to go around. Its been this way since the 2.4 release. It will arrive immediately if you pre-order it though. It shows you just how the demand for the cd's has grown exponentially.
Jeez! I run a tucows mirror (tucows.digital-galaxy.net), and have ran a mirror since late 1997...when TUCOWS BSD came about, i scrambled to be a mirror. TUCOWS has and is usually good about accurate content...
What shocked me was that TUCOWS lists everything on thier LinuxBerg and BSD sites as GPL! all the BSD's are listed as GPL!! I have sent a few letters to Scott (the man) and surprisingly he hasn't said anything back (a first).
I think it's an outrage to mis-lead someone about Licensing...that's *alomost* as bad as piracy.
rar.
NO SPORK
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
2 years of uptime isn't necessarily a good thing -- haven't there been quite a few remote vulnerabilities to Linux kernels in the past few years? I can't think of any that effect the FreeBSD kernel off-hand..
A couple things. First of all, getting first post in the BSD section is about as hard to accomplish as getting drunk at a frat party.
Secondly, look at documentation. Take a look at the documentation for a random program, for this purpose, we'll use cksum. The BSD version of cksum has three different methods of deriving a checksum, with mathetmatical descriptions of what each one does, making it easy to interoperate, and easy to figure out why two cksum's don't match.
The Linux man page contains almost no information, with a pointer to an info page with only slightly better information, that still pales compared to the BSD documentation.
Linux also invents it's own standards sometimes. Linux users don't realize this, since they're too busy hating microsoft, but sometimes Linux does things differently, just because some author didn't know any better.
As for Linux being more popular, which one? It makes the BSD community look downright united.
Better supported? why do you say that other than to troll?
Easier to learn? Bullshit. Pure bullshit. I knew slackware really well, then I switched to RedHat. Suddenly I was in a new world. I got sick of RedHat and switched to debian, and there it was, another new world.
PS: Is there any real reason that you've never gotten laid?
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"Don't trolls get tired?"
Because compared to BSD Linux is about as stable as windows95.
Linux is pathetic as far us UNIX's go, I refuse to use it as anything other than a desktop workstation and I honestly try to avoid it then too.
Here's a quote from RFC 793:
Urgent Pointer: 16 bits
This field communicates the current value of the urgent pointer as a positive offset from the sequence number in this segment. The urgent pointer points to the sequence number of the octet following the urgent data. This field is only be interpreted in segments with the URG control bit set.
And now here's a quote from the Linux tcp(7):
tcp_stdurg
Enable the strict RFC793 interpretation of the TCP urgent-pointer field. The default is to use the BSD-compatible interpretation of the urgent-pointer, pointing to the first byte after the urgent data. The RFC793 interpretation is to have it point to the last byte of urgent data. Enabling this option may lead to interoperatibility problems.
It's not until RFC 924 where this difference is noted, and corrected. Thus, your example of an incompatibility is one where there was a legitimate cause. The 3 full years between the publishing of RFC 793 and 924 meant that there was software written to adhere properly to a standard. The interoperability problems between the two revisions meant that a de facto standard had been created. I'm sure somewhere there's archived discussion on what to do about this matter.
Anyway, think what you want about my reasoning skills, I was responding to an obvious troll, sort of like what I'm doing right now. I don't generally invest effort in such posts, as it wouldn't be appreciated anyway.
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"Don't trolls get tired?"
Well, firstly, you'll have to substantiate the importance of each part of your claim that the BSD's are a lot less popular, supported, and easy to learn, and that these are negative things.
... - their choice in operating system doesn't seem to indicate they'll be nice or nasty people. In my experience, people just "are", and there're many more things that form the person than simple OS choice.
Popularity is really not a good reason to choose something. Windows is a lot more popular than Linux. It has more users, more commercial programs, more programmers, certifications, and possibly books, training courses, and any number of other things. It doesn't make it any better, really, now does it? Yes, there are more Linux users than FreeBSD users. It doesn't really make that much of a difference.
As for support, is getting support for SuSE easy to get in a group that predominantly uses RedHat? Yes, some of the stuff is incredibly similar, but there are differences. The differences are on rough par with any differences you may find running FreeBSD, for example. As for commercial support, Wasabi Systems, BSDi, and a number of smaller consulting and support firms exist, reminiscent of Linux just two years ago. They'll grow, and BSDi is a good bet, and a reasonably well-known name amongst the older crowd of managers, so that's a bonus. I find the FreeBSD online support great, if that's a help. It's incredibly unusual for a help request to questions@FreeBSD.org not to be answered, and at least a few times correctly. (:
Easier to learn, again, is questionable. It's easy to learn something if you have, say, a friend next door that runs the same thing. At my university, FreeBSD became very popular (much more so than Linux) because the people who took the time to help out and organize things knew FreeBSD best, and suggested people try it. Those same people who used Linux before considered FreeBSD much easier to learn. The same may apply the other way around in your area. It isn't a matter of ease, but your surroundings. If you go it alone, like I pretty much did, it ends up being a personal matter (discussed below). As for documentation, I'd say it depends on the person. The FreeBSD Handbook helped me through most of my trials, but some find it too complicated, and some find it too abstract. Greg Lehey's book is good. There're FreeBSD courses offered by BSDi, amongst others. The NetBSD documentation is technically great and complete.
As for choosing between them, there are a few areas you have to discuss, really:
Firstly, why RedHat vs. SuSE? Why RedHat vs. Debian? Why foo and bar vs. fred and wilma? (obscure? me? never.) In this case, it's a matter of taste - some people just prefer something to another. It just fits their way of thinking and of doing things. And that requires trying everything until you can decide what fits your style. (Slackware's "do-it-yourself" vs. Debian's "we-have-a-package-for-everything!")
Secondly, we have to consider the actual product. The BSD product is integrated kernel and userland, with a full operating system as the product. Linux is a kernel, and RedHat, Debian, SuSE, and friends are the "full operating system" in the end, with subtle differences in between as to which programs are standard, where they live, how to configure them, versions, and so forth. "Linux 2.4.0ac1" is nowhere near sufficient to discuss a problem you may have - you need to know "RedHat 7.0" or "Debian 2.1" or something like that. You'll also need to know what modutils version, ppp version, and all sorts of other things. The BSDs have a slightly more integrated system, which may seem slightly inflexible to some, but which makes solving these things a lot easier - "FreeBSD 4.2", or "FreeBSD -CURRENT from 5 January" are pretty specific in what they contain.
Development models are slightly different. Linux has Linus being the only person with the ability to directly incorporate a change (which may be passed through a number of filters, such as Alan Cox, before Linus does the actual putting of the code in the source tarball), whereas with the BSD groups, there are a number of people who may make such changes in the kernel. Again, BSD is integrated userland and kernel, whereas the Linux distributions have different models for patches - Debian being the most community driven (roughly equivalent to the way the Open Source BSDs are run), and RedHat and SuSE having slightly more closed commercial processes.
Pure technical reasons are hard to find. Linux is ahead in some areas, the respective BSDs in their own. NetBSD's portability (not just kernel, but userland, and quality portable and correct coding models) is a god-send to many. While you can get "Linux" for Alpha, PPC, ARM, Intel, Dreamcast, and friends, it won't be the same Linux distribution, and will not be the same system, really (actually, Debian may come close). FreeBSD still has the occasional performance benefit, and still leads with some new features like kernel queues, accept filters, jail facility, and others. OpenBSD still has the most integrated crypto, followed only slightly further behind by FreeBSD and NetBSD, and also a well-auditted set of programs, and occasionally comes up with things like strlcpy and strlcat that are so obvious and yet missing.
You may consider the general community as a reason to choose something. You'll find your trolls in all of course. Some prefer the more "less talk, more code" and skill-driven attitude of NetBSD, or maybe the very weird culture that I enjoy in FreeBSD - a balanced "Let's try to do things right, and that means staying up to date, not falling behind but not living too close to the edge, copying ideas from other people's stuff, writing our own, and having fun while we're doing it" kind of attitude. I've had bad experiences with some online Linux communities, and with some online FreeBSD communities, and with some
I'm rambling I suppose, but my final suggestion is that unless you have almost no time, no motivation, and no interest in exploring something else; just try it. Learn as much as you can about their differences and similarities, advantages, disadvantages, get kicked from lame IRC channels, enjoy socialising with the nicer IRC or mailing list people, and have fun, increase your knowledge, and try to be an ambassador for whatever your choices may end up being.