The NetBSD Organization

A reader writes: "Stumbled across a nice article about how the NetBSD Project is organized and some interesting ways users can help out." Good stuff, for those who want to get involved.

Comments

Re:The great divide:

[DaBj]

Or as my friend whom I introduced to BSD put it
when looking into using Linux on his desktop:
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux"

(I can hear RMS getting his panties in a twist already)

netbsd ...

[SuperDuG]

Whoa ... back to the wonders of the open source world where one thing is obviously better than the other, they can't both be ... *gasp* equally great *gasp* ...

Needless to say if anyone ever asks you a question of what runs NetBSD ... you can safely say more things than any other operating system. NetBSD runs on everything from a supercomputer to a dreamcast and everything in between. The most impressive things I've seen from NetBSD is the ability to get the OS running on anything that can process information and NFS ... second to none.

There are ninches for everything ... portability ... netbsd wins hands down.

From the article

[__past__]

For example, if a kernel developer makes a change that affects a utility then they normally just go ahead and make the change to the utility as well.

This innocent little sentence sums up one of the most important reasons to prefer BSD over GNU/Linux (or make that RedHat/GNU/Linux, SuSE/GNU/Linux...). It is really nice to have a coordinated group responsible for a complete, working system, instead of a distributor that merely duct-tapes together unrelated, each on their own incomplete, parts.

Why so many negative comments?

[core plexus]

I help out on some sites, and they all use Apache and freeBSD, and I've never had a problem. I believe it makes it less expensive for people to host on non-Microsoft servers, and having and open mind is important to keeping open software. If a fraction of the users of Microsoft and other commercial software spent a fraction of their time and effort (instead of downloading pr0n) to projects...well, who knows what could happen. A movement, perhaps?

Re:The great divide:

[rutledjw]

There are other differences as well:

• SMP Support, FreeBSD is the ONLY one who has it
• Commercial vendor support. Oracle, IBM, Sun, etc support Linux. BSD support is IMPROVING, but not near the support Linux recieves.
• Let's face it, Linux IS easier. I use Slackware and so I'm in the configs (as opposed to wizards), but Linux still is easier for me. Do I just need to get off my @ss and learn BSD? Probably
• Better java support in Linux. I know the "j" word is dirty around here. Even so...
• This is going to sound TOTALLY dumb - Commercial vendor support. If my company can't buy support, the world will certianly end due to lack of it. Whatever...

That being said, I'm proposing FreeBSD for our web servers as a replacement for (are you ready for this?) Apache on Windows. The fall back is actually Linux/Apache, but I think from a security standpoint, BSD is probably the way to go.

It DOES mildly annoy me to see the original parent post. BSD folks seem usually mild-mannered towards others. But every now and then some jackass...

Re:*BSD clusters?

[questionlp]

Nik Clayton of the FreeBSD project has a page with links to resources on clustering FreeBSD. Some of the links are dead, but the ones that work should give you enough information about clustering FreeBSD (and possibly other BSD operating systems).

It's probably not as elegant or as well known as Beowulf clustering, but it has been done :)