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The State of the Demon Address
Kelly McNeill writes "It's an exciting era in the Berkeley Software Distribution world; indeed, things started off with a litigious bang over a decade ago, but now BSD solutions are more varied than ever before and offer the user heretofore unprecedented choice and power. So many are the options today that it's time for a roll call from the various distributions. Paul Webb submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which takes a look at what each BSD has to offer and also looks at where each is going."
Too bad I can't mod the story flaim bait; the treatment of Net and Open is a bit heavy handed and the article seems to be written as a FreeBSD advert....
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
I was using BSD 4.2 in college over 15 years ago, and the litigation didn't happen for quite some time.
BSD's roots are in the early 80s when they were working closely with Bell Labs, and both versions of Unix were quasi-official.
Obviously, the big break for the modern BSD was 386BSD, which brought the OS to the personal computer a little over a decade ago.
Today, I think it is the rich set of userland capabilities that distinguish the BSDs to the point that occasionally Linux distributions pop up that emulate their functionality (e.g. Gentoo's use of a BSD-like ports system).
BSD is a rich OS with a long history, and I'm glad that it's still around and growing into niches that need it. Today, I'm mostly a Linux user, but I remember my roots and the joy that life was when BSD gained popularity over the proprietary OSes of the day back in the 80s.
I am a BSD user since 386BSD days, and a frustrated linux admin.
There is enough room in the world for both, and hopefully many more. Vote with what you run, be proud, but don't knock the other guy.
I get what I want out of my FreeBSD installations, I hope there are many Linux and any other flavor OS users out there just as happy with their installations.
Life is to short, enjoy it the best way you can with what you like!
There is exactly one GNU/Linux... which is ultimately designed by one team.
Bwahahaha! You've got one kernel (with half a dozen semi-official patch sets), one GNU metaproject (with dozens subprojects each with their own team), imports from several other projects, and an infrastructure that is unique to each distribution. Then you have some tiny distros that use busybox and dietlibc. Or realtime embedded variants.
Claiming that there's exactly one system/team in this mix is beyond absurd.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I've never read as much bullsh*t in so little text.
The person obviously never looked at NetBSD in detail, nor has any deep understanding of concepts like performance and security, else it would be obvious that they are not something that NetBSD has to brag about, but rather something that's considered normal.
Of course if you have nothing else to sell you can say "we're oh so secure" or "hey, we have all the cool GUI stuff, we can afford the bloat" - NetBSD won't, given it's constraints given through the portability. NetBSD has to offer state of the art operating system that OF COURSE is secure, and OF COURSE is performance optimized, and OF COURSE has about all the drivers available. But there's more to that other than the things that every operating system offers OF COURSE these days.
Blindly ignoring the facts and judging by some marketing slogan and hear-say proves that the author has no technical background for his writing at all, and obviously doesn't know any code of ethics for writing.
- Hubert (in bad mood)
I'm a FreeBSD advocate and all, but lets everyone bear in mind that this does not, I repeat NOT, come from any sort of official channel either in Berkeley or the FreeBSD project. It is a freaking OS Opinion editorial. Calling it a "State of the Daemon Address" is deliberately misleading and in extremely poor taste.
Aside from a few vocal "Linux is teh sux0r" zealots, the FreeBSD community doesn't really worry itself too much about what the other BSDs or Unix-alikes are doing and certainly don't typically engage in penis-length matches such as this editorial.
The wording is inflammatory, the facts are wrong, and a quick Google reveals with near certainty that the author isn't actually involved with the FreeBSD Project on any level.
I don't know all of the of the Net/OpenBSD split, but in my view. As far I am concerned in 2004, it is ancient history. I use OpenBSD for my routers and DNS at the house, and have not had a lick of trouble with it. It just works, and it does its thing on extremely modest hardware (P/133, P/166, and P/200 boxen). In my view, there are not enough accolades available for PF.
Furthermore, with his all of his unsteadiness and unpredictability, Theo manages to heard the cats every six months for a solid, production quality release. No OS, commercial or open source, has been as consistently reliable for me in terms of operation, quality, or schedule. Let's not get into the patch responsiveness of the OpenBSD team.
If Theo is the loon this trolling article claims, we need a few more loons like'em. He leads a team that produces a great product. Cheers Theo -- keep up the great work.
The author fails to point out the direct relationship between a distribution that sets out to conquer hell and the requirement for the participants to invest in a few pairs of asbestos underwear.
He also fails to point out the leadership qualities that OpenBSD has brought to the BSD buffet: OpenSSH, Darren Reed's packet filter, and soon the Via C5J Esther processor with user-space crypto acceleration, whose design was influenced by activities within the OpenBSD camp.
The author also throws a lot of unnecessary FUD at the stabalization of the FreeBSD 5.x series. The kinds of people who choose to deploy OpenBSD for their firewalls and FreeBSD for their application servers don't sit around and quaver about a few drops of -stable holy water. If you aren't prepared to read the lists, use 4-latest. If you are prepared to read the lists, you can decide for yourself whether the remaining troublespots in 5.x are a problem or not for your intended application.