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UserBSD vs. UserLinux - Is It Feasible?
A not-so-anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "Someone has suggested to make a UserBSD instead of a UserLinux. From what Bruce Perens' anonymous 1-million-$ backers seem to want (no GPL-/Commercial dual-licensed development toolkit like Qt in any library, but only gratis LPGL stuff), this seems to make a lot of sense. After all, only the kernel would be different, the rest of the stuff (including the KDE or GNOME desktops) runs pretty much the same on BSD as it does on Linux. Is it possible to get the legal problems solved with licenses and still create a usable enterprise Unix desktop system on *BSD?" The idea, in and of itself, sounds fine, but does the choice of kernel really matter? What advantages would BSD have over Linux in such a project, and vice-versa?
"Try using the FreeBSD kernel with OpenBSD"
True, although FreeBSD has had a lot more development time thrown at it recently with the upgrade to the 5.x kernel.
"It has very little commerical support for commodity hardware."
I suspect you mean that there aren't a lot of closed source drivers for hardware. The question then comes, do you really want a whole load of closed source drivers hanging around? To date, I think the most that Linux has got is Nvidia drivers and possibly some ADSL stuff. I *believe* that the Nvidia drivers run under Linux compat, but I've not checked, mainly because I don't really want my freebsd box to do that kind of thing.
"BSD has always been a geek os and will never reach the same popularity as Linux. Linux is everywhere."
Replace 'BSD' with Linux and 'Linux' with windows to see how fallacious this argument actually is. For shame.
"It is harder to install. You have to compile everything manually from a huge CVS respitory. It dosen't havge advanced Linux Packageing Systems such as APT, RPM, Portage, friendly GUI based autodectecting installers such as YaST, DrakX, Anaconda, etc."
The ports collection is not a CVS repository, and it's actually extremely easy to install FreeBSD. Open and NetBSD are completely different, however, and not for beginners.
Having said that, I've gotten on extremely well with the ports collection and CVS updates, although I don't class myself as anything approaching a hardcore geek.
"BSD is easy to make propreitery. You can take the code and make it propreitery. I can make Microsoft WinBSD XP and you can't do anything about it hahaha!"
Except ignore it. I fail to see your point here. Are you against freely available source code or the BSD license?
"It is not secure. People do not trust bsd to run it. Even OpenBSD, which claims to be "the securest OS ever made" runs on Solaris. They can make up excuses, but if you don't eat your own dog food, why should my Dog eat it?"
Nice, you picked out a good point there. Did you check the Freebsd or NetBSD servers? Did you not thing that not checking those out would drop you to the level of a troll? FWIW, Linux and FreeBSD tend to share the same security advisories.
"It has no support."
Au contraire. You can buy support, or avail yourself of the many newsgroups (ick), books or mailing lists without those dumbass kids trying to make you feel stupid. It's one reason why I'm really happy that FreeBSD stays under the radar compared with the religious wars over which 'distro is best'. I just can't abide this constant comparison with other OS's based on the 'whizzy' features that made Windows such a bloaty piece of crap.
FreeBSD does it's job, and it does it's job well according to my five odd years of using it.
"BSD are ex-linux geeks who coudn't take the fact that KDE and GNome made linux useable for the masses, so he ran and cried to his command line mistress!"
Ah, you're suggesting that the graphical user interface is the way forward? Have you considered windows 2003 server for your needs?
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
PostgreSQL is released under the BSD licence.
- Sw Usr
It's interesting to note the GNU project's essay about the X Consortium and Open Group's plan for developing X and an essay on GNU/Linux naming. Both essays cite some calls for chasing popularity at the expense of software freedom. I think we're better off as a community letting popularity take a back seat to freedom.
Your point is well-taken, but I'm not sure what roots you're talking about here. Bruce Perens is part of the group that started the Open Source movement--the movement that wants to "sell" Free Software by never mentioning the software freedom and only talking about the practical advantages of a software development methodology. They do this because they believe this will make the software easier for other people (chiefly businesses) to adopt. The advantages that the Open Souce movement touts come from having software freedom, so it's quite ironic that the Open Source movement champions the practical benefits of software freedom while distancing themselves from freedom talk. This leads to a built-in flaw for the Open Source movement: people can't justify choosing the software the Open Source movement wants you to run and develop if there's a proprietary program that better meets your practical needs.
The Free Software Foundation wrote an interesting essay on the differences between the Open Source and Free Software movements that also discusses shortcomings of focusing on the Open Source movement's goals.
Digital Citizen
He is not worried about any of the issues you stated. His concern is allowing companies who buy UserLinux to use the toolkits to develop propriety applications (which you can do with GTK+ and PostgreSQL). With Qt and MySQL you have to use the GPL as your license, while this isn't bad, it is a sticking point for many companies that can be avoided.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.