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Overview of the BSDs
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.'"
I've always wondered why Linux gets the mainstream press and BSD is not well known. Is it the licence???
While i use OpenBSD 3.1 on my server at home, and love their security standpoint, i couldn't help but correct the article. It mentions that there's been one hole in 6 years, what it doesn't say, is that it is only the default install that has that track record, not the ports database or any of the apps people compile themselves. It's an important distinction to make.
I thougt it was already dead!
Long Live BSD!
I thought the term *BSD referred to all BSD systems (Free-,Open-,Net- etc).
Je ne parle pas francais.
1. Write review of various BSDs.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
From the article, page 1:
What is BSD? If you ask a typical computer "expert," he or she is likely to reply (incorrectly!) that it is "an operating system."
From the article, page 1, TWO PARAGRAPHS LATER:
Industrious programmers quickly developed replacements for these six files and made the BSDs into usable operating systems.
So I'm being pedantic, so what.
I was reading the summary thinking "Blue Screen of Death OSs... a retrospective on the legacy of Windows. Cool." Then I realized we're talking about the other BSD.
I'm gussing I should take this as a clue that I've been using Windows way too long!
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?
Shouldn't that be GNU/BSD?
GNU/Apache
GNU/Mozilla
GNU/Scrabble Brand Crossword Game
I've said this before, but...
:/
I'm a Debian guy but I love NetBSD too. Why? Very clean, very minimalist, good documentation, clean and commented code, consistency... IMHO, it's the best alternative to learning UNIX today. Older computers like it too. Debian Sid runs OK in my Duron, with thousands of packages and dozens of new ones every week, running OpenGL games, etc. NetBSD is very happy as a router and learning system inside my Pentium 100.
Sometimes someone asks me why I don't use OpenBSD instead. Because of that stupid fish! Long live Beastie! BSD have the best mascot of all and OpenBSD just throw it away?
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
What is BSD? If you ask a typical computer "expert," he or she is likely to reply
Next Page >
(incorrectly!) that it is "an operating system." The correct answer, however, is more complex than that.
Next Page >
BSD is -- among other things -- a culture, a philosophy, and a growing collection of software, most (though not all) of which is available for free and with source code.
Next Page >
Here are the origins of BSD and the operating systems it has spawned.
Next Page >
BSD stands for "Berkeley Software Distribution," the name first given to the University of California at Berkeley's own toolkit of enhancements for the UNIX operating system.
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It's when you get distracted by the politickers that they sideline you. The tireless work that you perform keeping the system clean and building is what provides the platform for the obsessives and the prima donnas to have their moments in the sun. In the end, we need you all; in order to go forwards we must first avoid going backwards.
To the paranoid conspiracy theorists - yes, I work for Apple too. No, my resignation wasn't on Steve's direct orders, or in any way related to work I'm doing, may do, may not do, or indeed what was in the tea I had at lunchtime today. It's about real problems that the project faces, real problems that the project has brought upon itself. You can't escape them by inventing excuses about outside influence, the problem stems from within.
To the politically obsessed - give it a break, if you can. No, the project isn't a lemonade stand anymore, but it's not a world-spanning corporate juggernaut either and some of the more grandiose visions going around are in need of a solid dose of reality. Keep it simple, stupid.
To the grandstanders, the prima donnas, and anyone that thinks that they can hold the project to ransom for their own agenda - give it a break, if you can. When the current core were elected, we took a conscious stand against vigorous sanctions, and some of you have exploited that. A new core is going to have to decide whether to repeat this mistake or get tough. I hope they learn from our errors.
Future
I started work on FreeBSD because it was fun. If I'm going to continue, it has to be fun again. There are things I still feel obligated to do, and with any luck I'll find the time to meet those obligations.
However I don't feel an obligation to get involved in the political mess the project is in right now. I tried, I burnt out. I don't feel that my efforts were worthwhile. So I won't be standing for election, I won't be shouting from the sidelines, and I probably won't vote in the next round of ballots.
You could say I'm packing up my toys. I'm not going home just yet, but I'm not going to play unless you can work out how to make the project somewhere fun to be again.
= Mike
--
It was the first free Unix. All kinds of cool stuff comes from BSD. Where would we be without BSD sockets?
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
The Morris Internet worm that virtually shutdown the Internet attacked SunOS, which is a BSD, and DEC VAX running 4 BSD.
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.
From Linux to FreeBSD and haven't looked back. As soon as Nvidia releases their FreeBSD drivers I'm golden. I was shocked at how much faster KDE ran under FreeBSD than Linux on the same machine. Now I'm wondering if I should make the switch yet again to OSX. Any thoughts?
Around the same time, Linux surfaced. Based on the Minix kernel written by computer science professor Andrew Tannenbaum, and unencumbered by the spectre of a lawsuit, Linux began to gain momentum and became the best known freely redistributable UNIX-like operating system.
I was with you up until this point. Leave out this paragraph and you have an excellent, if slightly biased, article on *BSD.
Better tell Redhat to pack up shop.
With the Linux distros becoming more stable one of the greatest advantages to the BSD family is the ports collection. Linux might come out of the gate running loads of apps and a xdm login but give me a few hours and I can make any BSD sing and dance exactly how I want it. How I use O/S FreeBSD Internet Services OpenBSD VPN/Router/IDS NetBSD EOF Exotic Hardware running modern O/S http://www.spectechnologies.net/projects/ehardware /index.html
Solaris Database/CAD WS
Win2000 Games/office
Linux cluster/ipaq linux/dev
my projects http://www.spectechnologies.net
projects @ http://spectechnologies.net
Click on print and you will get the whole article on one page.
Well at least we have good cod.....
Buffer Overflow... SegFault....
Welcome, you've got Root!
Solaris is one of the best operating systems around. It has a strong TCP/IP stack with hundreds of options you can tune and an excelent kernel design... most of it's internals came from BSD.
The GPL is a source of contention.
MS doesn't have a problem with the BSD license, because it allows for incorporation into proprietary applications, like the TCPIP code in Windows.
I have never heard of a linux or netbsd system crashing. Have you?
http://saveie6.com/
...Why haven't you tried a BSD? Even if just out of curiousity? :)
I don't read at -1... so I just have to ask...
Did someone post "*BSD is Dead" yet?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Don't let the title fool you. This article was great. There was, however, one clearly uninformed statement. The GNU GPL does not prevent you from charging other people software based off of GPL'ed code; it mandates that the source code for any modified or improved versions be distributed either free or at no greater than the net cost of distribution.
/. said earlier "trademarks exist to protect the consumer". Yea, my ass they do. Its time we stopped letting corporations divide the language between them.
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
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
This article was qualified as "informative"? True, it does give much factual information about the history of BSD, it does take quite an editorial stand... and the author calls Linux advocates dogmatic... talk about the pot calling the kettle black...
Other criticism:
1) Linux isn't an operating system... true... RMS is preaching as much... GNU/Linux is however an operating system...
2) "Proponents of Linux tend to take a 'revolutionary' stance, seeing their work as a war to compete with, and destroy, Microsoft and other commercial software vendors." This is a bit of an exaggeration combined with an oversimplification.
3) "only one security hole that would allow an intruder to break in from the Internet has been discovered in the past 6 years" I'm just guessing, but I'd think this only includes software as part of the BSD operating system, and not third party contributing software... Hell, the Slapper worm is a port of a BSD worm over to the GNU/Linux system...
4) "Unlike most other operating systems (including most distributions of Linux), FreeBSD is extremely easy to install directly via an Internet connection." Maybe if you go by raw numbers of Linux distros, but I've installed RedHat over the network for years...
I could go on, but I don't feel like it... I just wish the article could be more neutral and not bash every other operating system out there, including GNU/Linux...
-jag
http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
but a bit biased in favor of fbs
For good reason.
FreeBSD KiCKz MaJ04 aZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!
QED
Mod parent up, this guy hit the nail right on the head! :)
I don't think he's got issues with just the GPL, he's got issues in general
For the record, I prefer the BSD license...
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.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Linux doesn't have ANYTHING like this!!!!
I'm switching right now!!!
..has recently been released, this is the massively updated layer beneath OS X 10.2 (aka jaguar aka jagwire). At the moment only the PPC binary installer is available, the x86 version is apparently on it's way, until then there's always the older 1.4.1 x86 version. IMHO it's good that Apple are keeping both the source and binary Darwin distribs up to date. A Whole bunch of the engineers at apple are heavily committed to open-sourcing (and not just those you'd expect like Jordan Hubbard). Using the Darwin Core and something like Fink or DarwinPorts you can end up with a nice and 'free' OS with Xfree86, KDE et al.
Linux is becoming commercialized, RedHat/IBM taking over, and following in MS's footsteps. I sure don't want to be a Linux follwer just because of that, let alone 10,000 other reasons.
This commercialization of Linux defeats the original goal of Linux, but what the hell, everyone's in it for a buck! *BSD on the other hand doesn't have to worry about that and can always stay "FREE" but more and more companies use it because of the licensing, yet at the same time no one knows it. I think Apple was really smart like this, but then again, if they chose Linux they would be very stupid!
Normally I wince and roll my eyes when I hear someone whining and crying about the name of the OS that some people call (GNU/)Linux.
But then I see articles like these that talk about the whole history and make no mention of the GNU project and/or Stallman, and I begin to think that Richard's whining may be justified.
Agreed that this article is great for bringing BSD onto the scene. I just started using FreeBSD recently at my new job, and coming from a Linux world, the install was awesome and it runs great, and after getting used to the filesystem, that's great too. However, I don't think it should have been put above Linux as much as the author had. I think Linux has it's place, on the desktop, and even more so, as a R&D tool.
Also, I didn't get the feeling that the author was putting FreeBSD in a bigger light than the others, could be my lack of experience with the BSD's.
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 ;-) ).
The article's point is that the a company can't use GPL'd code in their proprietary products and then charge licensing fees for the use of that software. Since most of the commercial software industry makes its moeny on licensing fees, the article argues that this essentially taking their incentive away from improving the code.
And with that point I disagree. Very little of the software used today is licensed on a large scale, but those that are (Solaris, Windows, MS Office) are commonly known. The author here is seeing a few trees here and callign them the forrest.
Instead most software is developed inhouse for inhouse applications (web apps, LOB apps, etc.) and these pieces are not sold on the open market. So in many areas, I believe that there is a financial incentive to take GPL code and improve it, and like with the BSD license, return that improved code to the community (if it is community owned, then the community can support it). The incentive here is not the gain in revenue from licensing fees but rather the cost savings by large-scale group-development, where no one entity is paying for every developer hour.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
First, I've used Unix since 1977 and BSD since about 1979 (whenever V3.0 BSD came out.)
Why is Linux more popular than BSD?
I think mostly because a useable, free distribution of linux was available first. Although a lot of the BSD code was freely available there was no real distribution you could load and boot for a few crucial years other than BSDi which cost about $1000 (and was very good, but you had to be willing to part with $1000.)
So, simply: A loadable, bootable, useable Linux was available for free to the general public before the same was available for BSD.
Some might nitpick about the availability of Jolitz' 386BSD but it was at best a very limited distribution and supported only some specific cpu/bios/disk/etc setups. From almost the start Linux used the BIOS drivers (ok I'm not a x86 internals weenie so might have this worded slightly wrong) which meant you tended to just get lucky if you tried Linux on your off-beat hardware, it'd usually just work.
Remember also that in the early/mid 90's x86's were much less standardized and you tended to do your own system integration taking a basic system with a motherboard and often adding a video card, a disk card, a disk, a sound card, etc. and all that had to be supported by OS drivers of some sort. Linux was better at that then BSD back then.
HISTORY:
What's seriously missing from the article are the specific reasons why BSD gained such fast popularity:
In the 70's the most popular system for hacking around on was the DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) PDP-11. It was relatively cheap for its day (usually under $100K!) and expandable and mostly maintainable by the sysadmins.
Unix from Bell Labs and very early BSDs ran on the PDP-11. But it was limited to 16-bits, many systems maxed out with 64KB (yes KB) of memory! Fancier systems could extend that to 128KB, and their rolls-royce model, the PDP-11/70, could handle 2MB but anything beyond 64KB was mostly used like a fast swap disk, you'd load programs and the OS would switch which 64KB (or for some 128KB, 64KB for the program, 64KB for its data) it was running right now.
Then, around 1978, DEC came out with the VAX (Virtual Address eXtension, of the PDP-11, tho that's more of a historical artifact of a name.)
The VAX had 32-bits of architecture and could support, well, over 1GB of physical and 4GB of virtual memory, at least in theory tho in those days 16MB of physical was huge super-computer stuff.
But the virtual memory system was very complicated and DEC released it only with their own proprietary VMS O/S which was kind of like CP/M on steroids (MS/DOS was based on CP/M), with a few additions like the VM support.
There were some early releases of Unix for the Vax (e.g., System/32 from AT&T) but they didn't support the VM hardware and so were very limited. VAXes cost around $500K, you didn't really want to spend half a million and then not be able to use the main point of the hardware!
Then Bill Joy (BSD, later one of the Sun founders) in probably one of the greatest virtuoso performances in hacking history added VM support to BSD and a VAX version was released.
Suddenly every University and research lab had to have a Vax running BSD, particularly by their 4.1 release. 4.2bsd added full TCP/IP support and a much more robust file system written by Kirk McKusick (previously a crash would often corrupt the file system and there was no real fsck so sometimes you'd have to use a kind of interactive file system debugger to fix a partition manually,
or just try to recreate it from backups,
ugh, you don't know the horror.)
DEC came out with the somewhat less expensive VAX 11/750 and even a 730 model (which really, really
sucked, but better than nothing!) and more and more people at universities & research facilities bought them to run BSD/Unix which, particularly with ethernet and maybe even an Arpanet connection, was just grand, heaven on earth.
DEC fought tooth and nail against BSD/Unix (any Unix) preferring to push their proprietary VMS OS even if it meant shoving down people's throats (e.g., they loved going to the suits and telling them that if their people run Unix on their $500K VAXes DEC might refuse to fix the hardware if it breaks...FUD.)
Eventually DEC relented and came out with their own version of Unix for the Vax based mostly on BSD and called it Ultrix.
But it was too little, too late, by then Sun was eating their lunch with much better Unix on machines that mostly cost well under $100K even in their fancy incarnations. And bitmapped workstations (Sun3/50) could be had for around $5K with disk (or you could run them diskless for less.)
Sun ran a pretty pure BSD/Unix and then in the late 80's merged it with AT&T's System V (as in five, not vee, there was a I, III, and probably some numbers in between not publically released.)
AT&T completely fell on its face with Unix coming out with the doomed 3B series of AT&T computers (proprietary CPU) running their SYSV Unix as well as the rebadged Convergent PC7300 which was kind of cool because to my knowledge it's the only machine that had a label on it "Unix PC".
I liked to thank the creator of the freebsd for making such a swell product.
A long, long time ago, in the State of Washington, a certain company that produces a lot of software needed a TCP/IP stack. Seeing many smaller companies producing TCP/IP stacks, they decided to buy one.
But when they bought the company out and started examining the code, they found that it was a Regents of Berkeley code. Since they did not want to advertise the BSD operating system, they instead went ahead and wrote a new stack using the knowledge of the old, BSD-based stack as a starting point. They also ported some BSD-derived utilities, which do include the copyright string, to the new Winsock TCP/IP stack.
But Microsoft never, ever shipped with a non-MS TCP/IP stack. They wrote their own code for Win95 and WinNT because they needed it, and they did not want to advertise the competition.
Check out this page for more information on this subject.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Mmmm. Good cod. Fresh from Newfoundland.
You don't use google?
Who the fuck has the time to write this shit? And I thought I spent too much time on slashdot.
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.
Wha? I thought BSD stood for "Berkeley Standard Distribution"...
You see that little Print button at the top of the article? It is your friend. Whenever viewing arcticles at sites that do crap like this, I always just hit the print article button and viola, a crisp, clean, layout all on one page.
Just wondering since all of the good desktop parts of OSX are proprietary, would you bother running Darwin if you can't use the OSX desktop.
Has anyone out there switched from FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD to Darwin? Do you think its better? Why etc.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
[sarcasm] I didn't know Linux was actually *based* on Minix. And because of the GPL you have no rights to sell it at all? Somebody'd better go tell RedHat quick! [/sarcasm] I expect more from Brett Glass, honestly. He sounded like some Microsoft evangelist. BSD can stand on its own merit, it doesn't need people to try and put down Linux. (My 2 cents.)
But what can we expect when we do plenty of BSD-bashing and run plenty of ridiculous "BSD is dying" articles?
This intense rivalry between the BSD and Linux communities is something that baffles me, since both basically want the same goals -- freedom for users, excellent software -- but go about doing it in different ways.
From my reasoning, people who GPL their programs are extremely worried about the possibility of the "public" project dying off, and a corporate project which doesn't care about freedom taking over; they also want to draw programs out into the open, hence the requirement that any modifications or programs based on a GPL'ed program be GPL'ed. People who use the BSD license just want to let others use their code for whatever purpose, so long as the original code is revealed; they obviously prefer the BSD license, and hope that others will be convinced to license their BSD-license-based software under teh BSD license, but do not force the issue, as does the GPL. The GPL is a slightly more aggressive approach.
Both camps are also concerned with the excellence of their products, though that concern manifests itself in different ways. While OpenBSD and NetBSD tend to focus on security and portability, respectively (and both of them on stablity), Linux' tend to focus more on performance, features, and ease of use. Of course, you can't speak for all of the Linux' as one. Debian and Slackware have a pretty rounded effort regarding security, stability, performance, and features, despite being somewhat difficult in ease of use. Alternatively, distributions like Mandrake and Corel tend to focus hardly on ease of use, while RedHat and Suse focus on ease of use and stability.
There is no absolute right or wrong. Different things are better for different users, depending on their technical needs and their politics.
Ultimately, all OSS / FS communities benefit from one another, particularly Linux and BSD, which have benefitted greatly from eachother. Linux has gained much in terms of hard technical details from BSD; conversely, BSD has benefitted from Linux being in the spotlight, as there are more applications for Linux, which means more apps that may run under BSD.
For me, the GPL and Debian are my license and OS of choice. I choose Linux over BSD because I'm a personal user and I need driver support for things like graphics cards from Nvidia and ATI; Debian because, among the Linux', it does tend to be the most stable and steadfast, with excellent quality-control.
For other people, something else is best. For those that love having absolute control, Slackware is best. For those who just want something that's overall pretty well rounded, RedHat, Caldera, Suse, etc are the way to go. For those who want something that focuses most on ease of use, Mandrake or Corel are good options. Other people will want a BSD OS. For those for whom security is a big issue, OpenBSD is the one of choice; for the person who needs something portable, NetBSD; for the all-around power-user, FreeBSD. Of course, that's just my opinion.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
.. towards BSD and against Linux.
The truth is that BSD vs. Linux matters very little. They are both free software, and can mostly run the same apps.
What matters are the apps. As long as you have Apache, Postgresql, openssl etc. it matters little wether or not the core is Linux or BSD.
When you have KDE, GNOME and bash it matters very little that the core is BSD instead of Linux or vica versa.
Based on this, people should be able to choose the OS on purely technical reasons. Linux is better for some things, BSD is better for others.
Frankly I don't care much for the whole BSD vs. Linux "war". If one of them "takes over the world" I'll be happy.
It's already been copied; rc_ng is now the default for -CURRENT.
Microsoft's very own SDK contains the Berkeley copyright notice in the following files: WINSOCK.H, WINSOCK2.H, and WS2API.H. Probably done for ease of porting. So why would MS care about the binary only stack if the header files that developers use mention Berkeley?
An AC wrote:
;)
> It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dy[chomp!]
[Munch! Slurp!] Help! [Crunch! Slurp! Burp!]
Sorry, folks, it looks like the famous "*BSD is Dying" troll is dead. Eaten by a Jaguar.
Move along, nothing to see here. He's a really neat eater. Please continue enjoying your BSD based OS.
Hey, Kitty. What say you and I go poke around the Microsoft campus and see if we can't scare up a nice juicy Longhorn for desert?
[Slurp!]
Good Kitty!
(No actual humans were harmed in the posting of this message.)
Hi, I'm using MS Windows 98 (Second Edition) right now, and I like it a lot. I mainly use Office XP, Quicken, Windows Media Player, internet explorer, and I like to play games also. I have been having some trouble with crashes (I think it is the new drivers for my Creative Sound Blaster Audigy), and someone said that the "BSD" operating system crashes less. I'm wondering if I should switch to it, will Office or windows media still work, also, does it have any good games?
thanx
"every major distribution comes with pieces of BSD, too."
Including Microsofts!
Obligitory Zoolander quote.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
...j00 know a lot about teh manham, don't j00?
The article is rife with anti-GPL and anti-Linux FUD. It is a myth that the GPL is anti-commercial. Microsoft would like you to believe that.
The history of the *BSD forks shows that the code would have been better protected under a free software license. The author fails to even mention Solaris, the most successful BSD derivative, whose code is still proprietary. None of "the BSD's" have caught up to Solaris in terms of "enterprise-class" features, the weak license robbed the community of that opportunity.
Today's success of Linux in the corporate world stands in contrast to BSD. Why? Because it has not been forked to death, changes by major players like IBM, Oracle and so on, are flowing back into the community. And corporations are still able to make it profitable, by selling packaged versions, support, services and so on.
The article also implies that Linux users are anti-commercial. Please! I think we're all proud at Linux's success in the corporate world and soon the corporate desktop, it shows that we're doing things right!
If only the original BSD had been free software, Linus and GNU authors wouldn't have had to reinvent every wheel...
Around the same time, Linux surfaced. Based on the Minix kernel written by computer science professor Andrew Tannenbaum, and unencumbered by the spectre of a lawsuit, Linux began to gain momentum and became the best known freely redistributable UNIX-like operating system.
The kernel architecture of Minux and Linux are totally different.Minux like NT is based on a microkernel. Linux definetly isn't. Tanenbaum himself stated this during his famous Linux is obsolete rant.
I just heard a quick blurb on the news, not too many details, but it appears the the geek community's favorite cripple, Prof. Stephen Hawking was found dead in his Cambridge home. You may not have understood his theories, but no one can deny his lasting impact upon the British ganster rap scene. Truly a English icon.
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to the slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were quickly nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
how does you flamebait constituted as BRILLIANT?
you are just some high-school dropout 21-year-old sitting on your mom's computer laughing and marveling at your flamebait. you s|_|ck teh manham
Dear lady.
I know you have recently immigrated into California State from Tijuana, Mexixo. Yes, I understand your hatred toward hippies. I also understand you ate hippies because they respected animals and notibly protested your performance, in Tijuana, as the woman in "The Donkey Show." We protested your improper act with the Reynaldo, the Donkey, and did not necessarily protest you on a personal level. Many individuals have sex with animals. We are protesting "The Donkey Show" because of the inherent danger and abuse imposed unto the Donkey. Please, get bent with a human. Peace. \|/
Sincerely,
-A follower of Cane \|/
Here is the difference.
If I get BSD code I can do pretty much whatever I want with it. Over time however commercial vendors are likely to create superior products to BSD licensed code and thus recreate a "closed source" situation. Conversely GPL code creates a community of developers which excludes closed source for profit developers.
So the real question is: 3 generations out do you want the closed source developers or the open source developers excluded?
God Damnit. I am not changing from Linux, to GNU/Linux, to BSD/GNU/Linux, it's just too much. I think being an operating system infers that some code has been stolen from some BSD or another and if I'm not giving credit to the BSD guys, I'm certianly not giving credit to the authors of textutils and bash, so Linux and just plain Linux it is.
I always thought it stood for Berkley Standard Distribution.
I've recently aquired some sparc classics and after installing sol9 and red hat on 2 of them was looking at bsd earlier this week but just couldnt decide which one to download and install.I should say im a win2k admin and have really only recently started looking at non-microsoft products.So im going to give freebsd a go:) A very informitive article for a new-alternative os user.
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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
NetBSD's attention to portability and "correctness" means that it often has the best-written drivers and is even more stable than FreeBSD
I've run NetBSD and FreeBSD many times. The only time I've ever seen them crash was misconfiguration (I did something stupid) or hardware failure.
How do you get "more stable" than any BSD? They just *don't crash*. :-)
Is it so outrageously hard to understand that Mac OS-X runs on Darwin (Darwin has some ties to BSD) which runs on top of Mach microkernel. Apple's Mach microkernel, which lies underneath Darwin has nothing to do with *BSD. What's the problem here? Are slashdotters so stupid that they don't understand this or do they deny to believe it? What is the problem here?
Hey, I'm 22, thanks.
shutup stupid
it's all about licenses.Hell you can run all the so "open source" apps on NT too. GPL is stupid.
BSD allows the author of the software total control of what he plans to do with it. Being that you've never coded.. it wouldn't matter to you so go on and use linux
There must be one of these posted per week. Nobody cares about BSD. It's a shame that OS X is crippled with a BSD core, but understandable since it grew out of the ashes of a failed BSD vendor Next.
She's too fat.
What an immature comment. How old are you? Oh wait, you *must* use Linux, n/m!
Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there may be no future at all for Linux because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux. As many of us are already aware, Linux continues to lose market share; red ink flows like a river of blood. Slackware Linux is perhaps the most in endangered. Let's look at the numbers.
9 5638,00.html)
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/ 03/05/daily41.html)
9 5638,00.html)
/ 1720254&mode=nocomment)
MandrakeSoft's CEO Henri Poole states that there are 70000 users of Linux-Mandrake. How many users of Debian GNU/Linux are there? Let's see. The number of Linux-Mandrake versus GNU/Linux posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. The refore there are about 70000/5 = 14000 GNU/Linux users. Slackware posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of GNU/Linux posts. Therefore there are about 7000 users of Slackware. A recent article put RedHat Linux at about 80 percent of the Linux market. Therefore there are (70000+14000+7000)*4 = 364000 RedHat Linux users. This is consistent with the number of RedHat Linux Usenet posts.
Now Linux companies are consolidating, overhauling their business plans, laying off staff, scaling back expansion plans and pushing back profitability schedules. "It would seem there are too many distributions for the market to bear," said Gartner analyst Tom Henkel. (http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,26
Red Hat, Inc., the leader in developing deploying and managing open source linux solutions, announced on a reported basis, a net loss of $24.2 million. (http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-
Turbolinux, based in Brisbane, Calif., a Linux-based software provider has withdrawn a $60 million initial public offering "in light of current market conditions." (http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/010320/n20215287_2.html) (http://cnnfn.cnn.com/2001/03/20/deals/ipo/)
Clayton-based Linuxgruven.com, a Linux training and service company with 106 employees, laid off 100 employees (http://stlouis.bcentral.com/stlouis/stories/2001
Lineo withdrew its initial public offering in January. Caldera Systems delayed the acquisition of Santa Cruz Operations' Unix software by a quarter. Linuxcare laid off dozens in February, with Linuxcare co-founders Dave Sifry and Dave LaDuke are among those departing. VA Linux Systems cut 114 people in February and delayed its expected profitability by nine months. (http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,26
Due to the troubles of Corel, abysmal sales and so on, Corel Linux is going out of business and was nearly taken over by Microsoft who sell another troubled OS. Owing to the GPL, SuSE is laying off almost all of its US staff. Major marketing surveys show that Linux has steadily declined in market share. Even LinuxWorld.com shut down "because of the economy and everything else" (http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/03/13
TuxRacer going closed source and commerical shows how, when it comes down to money, Linux doesn't cut it.
Linux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Linux is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyists (i.e. those who dabble with Minix, Xinu, etc). Linux continues to falter. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Linux is dead.
Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there may be no future at all for Linux because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux. As many of us are already aware, Linux continues to lose market share; red ink flows like a river of blood. Slackware Linux is perhaps the most in endangered. Let's look at the numbers.
9 5638,00.html)
0 3-22-010-20-PS)
/ 03/05/daily41.html)
9 5638,00.html)
/ 1720254&mode=nocomment)
MandrakeSoft's CEO Henri Poole states that there are 70000 users of Linux-Mandrake. How many users of Debian GNU/Linux are there? Let's see. The number of Linux-Mandrake versus GNU/Linux posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. The refore there are about 70000/5 = 14000 GNU/Linux users. Slackware posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of GNU/Linux posts. Therefore there are about 7000 users of Slackware. A recent article put RedHat Linux at about 80 percent of the Linux market. Therefore there are (70000+14000+7000)*4 = 364000 RedHat Linux users. This is consistent with the number of RedHat Linux Usenet posts.
Now Linux companies are consolidating, overhauling their business plans, laying off staff, scaling back expansion plans and pushing back profitability schedules. "It would seem there are too many distributions for the market to bear," said Gartner analyst Tom Henkel. (http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,26
Red Hat, Inc., the leader in developing deploying and managing open source linux solutions, announced on a reported basis, a net loss of $24.2 million. (http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-
Turbolinux, based in Brisbane, Calif., a Linux-based software provider has withdrawn a $60 million initial public offering "in light of current market conditions." (http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/010320/n20215287_2.html) (http://cnnfn.cnn.com/2001/03/20/deals/ipo/)
Clayton-based Linuxgruven.com, a Linux training and service company with 106 employees, laid off 100 employees (http://stlouis.bcentral.com/stlouis/stories/2001
Lineo withdrew its initial public offering in January. Caldera Systems delayed the acquisition of Santa Cruz Operations' Unix software by a quarter. Linuxcare laid off dozens in February, with Linuxcare co-founders Dave Sifry and Dave LaDuke are among those departing. VA Linux Systems cut 114 people in February and delayed its expected profitability by nine months. (http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,26
Due to the troubles of Corel, abysmal sales and so on, Corel Linux is going out of business and was nearly taken over by Microsoft who sell another troubled OS. Owing to the GPL, SuSE is laying off almost all of its US staff. Major marketing surveys show that Linux has steadily declined in market share. Even LinuxWorld.com shut down "because of the economy and everything else" (http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/03/13
TuxRacer going closed source and commerical shows how, when it comes down to money, Linux doesn't cut it.
Linux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Linux is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyists (i.e. those who dabble with Minix, Xinu, etc). Linux continues to falter. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Linux is dead!
shutup stupid
If the man wants to go with the commie GPL license, it's his right. If you're the one guy around here who's coded, kindly can it, log off, and get back to that Visual Basic "hello world" killer app, ok?
The old BSD OS long had no GNU software and had little or none when first freed from the grasp of the Unix owner. If only the delay caused by the legal problems hadn't gotten the *BSDs a too-late start in grabbing open-source mind-share, there would have been enough developers to make the BSD utilities at least as good as the GNU ones and there whould have been no need to import so much restrictively-licensed GNU software because there are too few developers to work on all the BSD-licensed code that was once used. (And having the bigger mind-share, snowball-down-the-hill effect (which Linux got instead), most of this new software like KDE, gnome, etc, would probably not be tied up in GPL chains so companies have the incentive to roll their own closed-source stuff instead of improving the open-source stuff like Apple is now doing with FreeBSD.
i confess i'd been curious and completely oblivious to BSD until this article (and i'd attempted research... all my searches were just too vague to really address the "linux vs. bsd" question, and the differences between the BSDs) - and my impression from the article, is thus:
;-p
if the oddly mixed world of free and open software were like some role-playing game...
linux would be the rather barbarous, anarchal tribes living in the wilderness. some of us would be religious war-chiefs (FSF/GNU), and others of us form tribes for the sole purpose of survival (the distros) making war over "Civilization" (Microsoft), in hopes of redefining it. the religious tribes seek enlightenment, to change the universe's consciousness to the greater good.
BSD is the more civilized, almost like Tolkien's elves, living off the OSS landscape with an higher academic purpose. they, unlike the linux tribes, live cooperatively with "Civilization", content in and of themselves to know that theirs is the glue binding the Universe.
-- i'm sure this sounds sarcastic, but i intend to be humourous.
as seems to be the case with many articles, this one completely ignored that not every (not-)Unix user *buys* or downloads a distribution. sometimes the best linux's are those we roll ourselves. in this fantasy, we Linux-From-Scratcher's would be rogues, living off the land ourselves and scorning cooperatives. (some of us rogues GNU-priests, others agnostic.)
are these non-existant among the BSDs? can you not "roll your own" BSD? (if you can, please tell me... i'm curious to try some BSD).
i think the author misunderstands (or is simply firmly against) the GPL. it's obvious by the success of distro's like RedHat that Stallmanesque Freedom does *not* dismiss profit (though RH is often under fire for *not* being Stallmanesque). my impression, then, is that BSD is not GNU-friendly - perhaps even antagonistic.
and it seems the author also misunderstands the distros... Caldera, SuSe, RedHat, i recall the author mentioning; businesses making profit, using whatever software is available. following the (apparent) BSD methods of development are Debian and (i'd argue) Slackware. how are these two distributions so radically different from BSD's development scheme?
thanks for posting the article! it finally answered some of my BSD questions (and created more questions) - it's good to know how the folks on the other side of the figurative open-source pond live.
btw, count me a GNU-layman rogue who trades freely among the tribes and collegiates.
Yeah like windows needs bsd code. Good one guys.. if it has any its just trace elements left.
Get over yourself theres no fucking way windows needs linux or netbsd.. theres millions and millons of code there and its 99% microsofts.. any other bits they could easy redo.
Windows is more advanced than linux in terms of multimedia, usb device management, com (object) management.. etc etc
I used a Unix on a VAX 11/780 which was used by many people (at the same time) exclusively for software cross-platform development at a big aerospace firm. What are the chances that it was running the BSD version of AT&T Unix instead of straight AT&T code? Or was it limitted to educational or non-profit use?
P.S. I soon switch to a VAX running VMS and much preferred that, largely because of its wonderful wall of manuals instead of those nasty Unix "man" pages which have only gotten worse over the years.
With so much work (including DARPA funding) going into reiserfs version 4, it seems the *BSDs might be missing out. I like FreeBSD from what I've done, and I see a lot of good technical merits when compared with GNU/linux. How feasible is it to port reisrefs to FreeBSD, assuming that it proves its worth?
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
See http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/sharing.html and elsewhere where people know of what they write.
GNU/Apache
GNU/Mozilla
GNU/Scrabble Brand Crossword Game
Hmmm - no.
I run Apache and Mozilla under Solaris, personally; BSD with its own libraries, and I believe you made up "Scrabble Brand Crossword Game".
Please go and learn something before you regret it in 10 years time when you're on the job market and this post can easilly be traced back to yourself.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
The Linux community is larger.
Got any proof to this?
Anyway, that's my take on it. For the record, I'm a Linux guy. To my knowledge I have never used a BSD.
Oh. So you don't have any facts to back you up.
Next time don't check the AC box Mr. Torvolis.
The DNS was out when I posted it... I run the DNS servers for K5, so I was rather alarmed to find out about this. It's fixed now because I went and talked with some telco people about the situation.
:)
But that's not really on the topic of this conversation
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
SVR4 added significant extensions to the data carried by signal handling, IPC, etc. when compared to SVR3. Useful concepts from the BSD family were used, as were a few from Xenix and SunOS.
The scheduling algorithms, memory management, configuration, and other features of SVR4 were sufficiently different that porting BSD code to the default APIs was a "challenging" project. Apps which used shared memory, semaphores, etc. required significant changes to run reliably.
The SVR4 environments I used (Sequent Dynix/PTX, Solaris, and another marginal player whose name I forget at the moment) each had BSD compatability libraries that would let you recompile your apps with minimal pain. I believe those compatability layers were largely vendor-specific rather than a generic feature of SVR4.
With Dynix/PTX, for example, you had a couple commands which let you switch between defaulting to BSD or SVR4 commands and libraries. You could blend the two environments in your code if you had to, but it was often tricky stuff.
Solaris did not use the same approach as Dynix/PTX, and actually seemed to make it harder to port old SunOS code than it did to recompile the same code under Dynix/PTX.
That unnamed OS had compatability libraries for recompiling code, but only supported SVR4 commands.
It would be a mistake to assume that the incorporation of good ideas from various *nix systems to be equivalent to merging them (which is what I read the "+" of the systems you mention to mean.) Remember that SunOS had a lot of proprietary code as well as the BSD base, and I seriously doubt too much of that was available for use in SVR4 (it could have happened, I just question the likelihood as that was the peak of the Unix incompatability wars.)
Although I've used HP-UX 9/10 and AIX (3.5/6?), I didn't work with them at the same low levels I did SunOS, Solaris, Dynix/PTX, "pure" SVR4, or Linux.
<OffTopicRamble>
How low-level was the work with Dynix/PTX?
By the time we were done with a two-year project, a 32 processor box was being bottlenecked by I/O capacity and the system bus, not the application code. The subsystem I wrote used X.25 data collection slaves, file writers similar to database redo logs, and shared memory under the coordination of a master/monitor process used to dynamically start/stop the processes. The first round of the functionality written using Tuxedo had proven to just be too slow, and had to be tweaked to the max.
That application almost beat out some work I did under VMS as far as maximizing system throughput. The work on VMS was a much simpler task, but I managed to get the I/O channels on three tape devices, five spindles of disk, the memory utilization, and CPU utilization on a VAX8600 (not positive about that model number) to all stay in the 95-98% load range...
</OffTopicRamble>
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
To all:
I know this is off-topic, but I figured this would be the time to ask, and my intention is sincere not to inflame or get points, so here goes...
I know BSD is usually used as a server, but what if I want to use it as a desktop computer? Where can I get an office suite? Photo editor? Games? Does this OS have support for NVidia cards? USB support? How much USB support? USB drivers from vendors spotty? Or was BSD not intended to support these items?
There is no "mostly" about it. Ultrix was BSD 4.1, released after we had been using BSD 4.2 on our VAX systems in University. Many of the manpages still had the BSD id strings, as did many header files. Running "strings" on libraries often reported BSD authorship as well. The final clincher was that all the bugs we had before upgrading to 4.2 returned with Ultrix (kernel panics, etc.)
Not really surprising, when you think about it. DEC was famous for providing "bug-for-bug" compatible VAX CPUs on the various models, because fixing the bugs would have broken too much code.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
shutup stupid
Heh... my 12 year old neighbour said the very same thing when trying to jump a garbage can on his 'Huffy' and faceplanted in front of half the street.
Totally different situation... yet I see similarities here...
BSD has always been associated with hippies. You, my friend are probably a hippie as well, being a Berkeley alumni. Because no one wants to be associated with a hippie (I am posting this as an AC, just to avoid being associated with you, a hippie), no one wanted to support BSD.
Of course, nowadays it's different. But then again, these are the days that morals go down the tube. I fear a society in which hippies once again are free to organise Woodstock-like festivals and protest marches against stock devaluation.
If all you hippies would just wake up, abandon your long hair (including the flowers) and wore a decent tie, then maybe, just maybe BSD might get accepted.
include 'bsd-is-dead.php';
People should stop fighting over linux and freebsd. They should be happy that both are excellent OS'es and also they are free.
reSisTanCe iS fUtILe
Linux is not free. It is GPLed.
Ergo: Berkeley Saure Diethylamide.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
Now I want an overview of the BSODs!
// Fraxinus
Someone posted about X not belonging on servers, and I agree. I worked for a .com a few years back (now.. well.. still there, but struggling), and we ran something like 70 Sun servers in a Co-Lo, and all of our administration was done by command line.
About a week after they hired me (I was NetOps, we maintained the website servers), they hired another guy for the internal network support (his boss had *rejected* me, with an attitude, because I had minimal Cisco router experience and had never worked with Cabletron hubs.. the NetOps manager hired me and w/in a year I was promoted to Team Lead)... This guy, a self-proclaimed 'Linux expert' started a week after me, and one of the first things they wanted him to do was add some userid's to a Linux box in the local data center. He logged on, and his first question was "Where's the GUI?"
That was a standing joke with us in NetOps for a long time after that. If you can't add a userid w/o the GUI, you shouldn't be a sysadmin.
Mistake#2, that got him laid off after maybe 2 months there, was when he took the customer support database box and took off the broken DAT drive (rmt0 on solaris), leaving the DLT drive on it (what was really used for backups), and did a "boot -r" on it and walked away. The next day, after the disk filled up when the backups created a huge "/dev/rmt/1cn" file on the server, and he couldn't figure out what happened (of course, the "-r" on the reboot rescanned the devs and make rmt1 the new rmt0)... well... he didn't last long after that.
Personally, I have an easier time sysadmin'ing on Solaris or BSD's than I do on various Linux's. We pretty much stuck with RedHat, and that was pretty easy.. but the lack of consistency between distro's on where things are really annoys me. Not that I can't figure it out.... Unix is Unix in most ways... if you know what you are doing you can figure out how to do anything.
The "new init system" actually appeared in NetBSD 1.5, and has been a part of NetBSD for over two years.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Which of those services is vulnerable?
They run by default because they have been heavily audited and are known to be secure.
Solaris is the entire system, and is SunOS 5.X based.
SunOS 4.x wasn't called "Solaris".. just SunOS 4.x
That's the standard mantra that is recited time and time again. We all know that's a potential consequence.
What I want to know is..
Can you cite some examples of superior products being created out of BSD code?
The fact that the text of the GPL is copyright the FSF does not in any way equate to the FSF being able to sue anyone who violates the GPL. If you think it does, please cite facts. When people talk of the FSF helping with enforcing the GPL, it is usually because the FSF *wants* to help out, and is invited to by the community; not because they have a copyright claim themselves. To put it differnetly, if I author an original work, license it under the GPL, and you break that license, *I* am the only person who can sue you. If I choose not to, the FSF can do NOTHING about it, to you or me.
Second: if I am the original author of the work, and I license it to YOU under the terms of the GPL, *I* am in NO WAY bound by the GPL. YOU are.
I am the copyright holder. I can release it under as many licenses as I want, or none, or sell it to the Evil Empire, or whatever I want. I cannot revoke the license I gave you, of course, but I am in no way bound by the GPL.
The GPL gets is strength from copyright. standard copyright applies. The GPL grants you other rights to a software above what standard copyright would. (standard copyright would allow you to use the binaries I gave you, and nothing else. Fair use modification maybe, but certainly not distribution, of the original or derivitives)
Finally, the original poster is correct that the GPL suggests a default. If the only way to get redhat CDs was to buy them from redhat, then people would buy a decent number from redhat.. but because of the GPL, people can ALSO choose to get them from a buddy. Over time, it just becomes commonly available. So unless your target audience is in dire need of other services oyu have, or is incapable of getting a copy from the community, your GPL derived works don't have as much commercial value as something you can license however you want.
I think maybe you are just trolling.. but you are dead wrong on both these points.
I asked my lawyer. He pointed out that the copyright on the GPL has absolutely nothing to do with the parties involved in the contract. Unless the FSF holds the copyright on the work being put under license, they have no say in the matter.
There is no breach of contact if I refuse to give you source code in this situation. *I* am not bound by the GPL.
let me spell it out for you.
If I give you the work, including the GPL.. you are free to NOT accept the terms of the GPL. If you choose not to, then standard copyright appplies. You can use the work, but you can't distribute it, can't distribute derivitave works, etcetera. If you DO choose to do soemthing you would normally be barred from doing under copyright law, like making derivitave works and selling them on ebay, then the only way you can do that legally is to accept the terms of the GPL.
I, however, hold the copyright. I am not bound by anything. The GPL does not require me to give up anything; you will notice the text of the GPL very clearly states that the RECEIVER (you) cannot re-distribute the work without following the terms of the GPL. It says nothing about what *I* (the one who licensed it to you) have to do.
All It says is that I (the copyright holder) grant you (some guy) certain previleges under certain conditions.
If I was re-licensing 3rd party GPL work, then YES, I would have to follow the GPL, because the only reason I would be allowed to distribute in the first place is because of the GPL. If I am the original author, though, there is no such agreement in place.
As for what is more free.. where did that come from? Do you think I'm arguing about which one is better of more free? I'm not, I'm simply correcting your grossly inaccurate analysis of what the GPL means.
Yes, you understand me correctly.
;)
Sorry if I sound mean.. you just seem to be missing the point.
Let's say I produce a work, and give you a copy.
Now, standard copyright applies. You can use it,
but you can't redistribute it, or distribute derivitave works, etctera. Right?
Now I offer to license it to you under the terms of the GPL. Those terms don't say ANYTHING about what I have to do; they only say what YOU are allowed to do. They grant you permission to make derived works and to distribute them, provided you also provide the source to those works to the people you distribute to, you see? It is only through distributing it that you bind yourself to the GPL.
I, as the original author, do not need a licence to distribute the work; I hold the copyright.
And if someone IS distributing my work contrary to whatever license I issued it under, I am the only one who can sue them for copyright violation.
Think about it. If the FSF could sue someone for violating a work that I had released under GPL, what happens if I just wait a couple weeks, let them spend money, and then grant that person a license to use it without the GPL?
The FSF is in no position to decide how or what happens to my original work. What if I asked you to write the terms of a contract for me to license software to my clients; would YOU then be allowed to sue my clients for violating it simply because you wrote the language in the legal document that is the contract? No, you wouldn't.
It's not a fiddling detail about the GPL; it's a fundamental concept in how these licenses work with regards to original authors and copyright.
BSD is no different. If I release code under the BSD license, can those who wrote the original BSD license sue people for violating it? No, only I can.
Am I obligated to put advertising in all versions I release? Of course not, it's my work in the first place. I am not bound by the license; only those who I license it to are.
Yes, MS could release the IE under GPL and keep the source code secret. Though that wouldn't really make any sense... because it would require anyone re-distributing their program to also provide the source, which they can't obtain.
It would be kind of hard for MS to enforce the terms of the GPL and accuse someone of distributing the software without source if the court can show that they refuse to provide the source in the first place though
The GPL states the terms under which the person who it is licenced to can do certain things. IT does not at all state terms under which the person granting the license on the original work has to adhere to.
I'm not a GPL advocate. I prefer BSD, for the record. I think the whole argument of one versus the other is silly. Yes, from the point of view of a developer wanting to integrate code into a product, the BSD license offers him more freedom. Absolutely.
If we twist freedom to mean "freedom from being made into something closed and proprietary" then obviously the GPL provides that freedom to it's software, and BSD does not.