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.'"

Comments

Re:BSD

[MobyTurbo]

The Linux community is larger. I'm guessing that this is because Linux was written for x86 origionally, and was therefore available for the platform just about everybody has before BSD was. Obviously this is not true now, but momentum is a hard thing to overcome. I'm not confident on my timeline here, so if someone could prove that BSD was available for x86 prior to 1991,

386BSD and it's commercial cousin BSD/386 (now BSD/OS) existed at around the same time as Linux kernel version 0.95 as I recall from Usenet posts. (A Linux user since 0.95 who has since migrated to Free and NetBSD.)

I'd happily concede the point.

Happily concede the point then. :-) At the most Linux was available on the 386 in a useful form a few months before BSD; if it weren't for the AT&T lawsuit during a crucial period you might have not made this statement:

Anyway, that's my take on it. For the record, I'm a Linux guy. To my knowledge I have never used a BSD.

Because you'd be running BSD. (Linus himself said that *he* would have run BSD if it weren't for the timing and the lawsuit.)