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Comparing Linux and BSD, Diplomatically
Joe Barr writes "Talk about a red-button issue. How do you compare Linux and the BSDs and keep the debate from turning into a friendly-fire flame-fest nightmare between bigots on both sides of the line? Linus Torvalds once handled a similar situation by wearing a BSD beanie at USENIX while delivering a Linux talk. Now he tries it again in this interview on NewsForge ."
To summarrize Linus :
1)They are different don't try to compare them.
2)I like Linux better because it agrees with me.
3) Don't ask me what I wan't in Linux (kernal) from BSD (kernal) because I don't use BSD.
Basically it was a whole bunch of nothing
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Sitting Walrus Blog
To the Moderator who modded this post "Flamebait":
The Solaris comment was a 'joke'. Humor is often times expressed on Slashdot in a manner that doesn't begin with the words "Two nuns walk into a bar....".
But I have a considerable fan club developing around my posts and have a few stalkers who are always itching to mod my posts down. Perhaps you aren't humorless afterall, but are just angry at someone you've never met.
Sounds strange when it is put that way, doesn't it?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Its very easy on openbsd, and I seriously doubt its much harder on freebsd. You have to download the distfiles manually because of Sun's stupid license, but then you just type "make install".
And of course, some company not making software for BSD is not a limitation of BSD. BSD is entirely capable of running the software, Sun just doesn't feel like releasing a BSD version.
"Linux has a much wider audience, in many ways. That ranges from supporting much wider hardware (both in the driver sense and in the architecture sense) to actual uses."
Sorry, NetBSD runs on more hardware that linux does..
I'd like to see a Venn diagram of the hardware supported by just BSD, just linux, and both. I imagine that if you gave each piece of hardware a weight by the number of people using that hardware, most of the weight would be in the middle of the diagram (i.e. both linux and BSD support it).
Also note that in the same setence, he was comparing the variety of applications supported by BSD vs. linux.
That's so typical! Leave it to the Linux users to redefine success in their own benefit...
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
How do you figure that? Maybe it used to be true, and it is certainly one of NetBSD's goals, but it's simply not true that NetBSD runs on more systems than Linux. NetBSD gives this impression by listing multiple "ports" for a single CPU architecture.
In fact, NetBSD supports 17 different types of CPUs, some of which are just variations of the other CPUs. It's difficult to find a complete list, but Linux supports at least 22 different system architectures according to this article, and many more of them are useful than the NetBSD ports. Not to mention the much wider variety of peripherals and interface cards that Linux supports than any of the BSDs support.
I can't think of *anything* that linux can do and BSD can't, much less "many" things.You're living in a different reality than the rest of us, friend. There are many, many user applications out there that work only on Linux, some of which will never be ported to BSD because they are commercial products. Like Maya, for instance, the software that is used for most computer animation today. Even some open source software runs so poorly on BSD that it's not worth using -- like MySQL. The fact is that even if these problems are mostly because of Linux's greater popularity and not technical, Linux is much better as a general purpose OS.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Well, obviously, the 'right' tool is a subjective term to begin with, so theoretically, the 'right' tool would take vendor lock-in, political ideals, et al into account.
"Old man yells at systemd"
If he looks at BSD internals, anything he comes up with relation to those internals might be considered derivative works and would need to be BSD licensed.
I was going to mod you down since I've got the points, but there isn't an "Incorrect, -1" moderation.
The BSD license is about as liberal as it gets, basically saying "Do what you want with the code but leave my copyright notice." This includes sticking the BSD code into GPL'd code, XYZ'd code, or even closed, proprietary code.
GPL is the license that says what is open must stay open, and even with that, only if you copy the actual code. "Ideas" are not protected by copyright, just expression. Protecting designs and more recently ideas is what patent law is for.
Personally, I find it hilarious that there's a standard anarchy symbol....
The hilarity can be explained by the following reasons:
1. You have absolutely no clue what anarchy means in a political sense.
You are probably one of these people who imagine crazed lunatics running around with cartoon-style bombs when you think of anarchists. In fact, anarchy (as a political term) is defined quite simply: absence of authority. Generally, I would describe it as a system of living without government or the enforced hierarchy which accompanies such government. You may not think this is practical or reasonable (fine, I agree) but don't ignorantly define anarchy as "chaos". If anarchists simply wanted chaos, they would call their movement chaotics or something.
The ideal of anarchy is a system voluntarily accepted by all without forcing it's ideas on anyone. Society would operate by a system which no one person or group controls, but everyone agrees to. By standards everyone follows, with no need to enforce them. Metaphorically, the best symbol for anarchy would be one that all anarchists adopted, but was not dictated or owned by any one of them in particular. Thus, we find that the symbol is actually quite appropriate, contrary to your "hilarious" view of it.
Solaris has fault tollerance features that aren't found in Linux. Solaris has support for isolating failing hardware and hotswaping everything includeing cpu boards. Big IBM, and SGI/Cray iron support this as well. To be fair most Linux developers don't have access to a Sun E10k. So it is understandable if they don't fully support it. Solaris zones are nice and currently better then Linux/Xen, and much better then usermode linux or VMware. On the userland side Solaris has excellent nis/nfs support that I have yet to find in any Linux distro.
However Solaris is big, stubborn, and ugly. I would rather admin three machines each with a different Linux distro then a single Solaris box.
Linux has other strenghts, but on big servers Solaris is best.
Poppycock. You do have to license derived works under BSD, it's just that the BSD requirements are minimal (Reproduce this copyright statement and disclaimer, and don't use us in your advertising), and you can add additional terms, such as the GPL.
You can't think of anything else besides large SMP systems that Linux does and NetBSD doesn't? Come on, you aren't trying very hard. Just off the top of my head, Linux has:
... lots more, really.
- Newbie-friendly installers with lots of really nice up to date free software (Ubuntu, FC4, etc.)
- Lots of custom distributions for specialized purposes, live CDs, etc.
- Accelerated 3D graphics with manufacturer-supported drivers.
- Support contracts available from Oracle and other large players.
- Hyperthreading support in scheduler.
- Kernel event system (dbus, hal, hotplug, etc)
- Device drivers for far more devices.
- Security levels beyond standard POSIX (NSA-designed SELinux framework, etc.)
- Really good, mature, journalling file systems.
-
Sure, NetBSD runs on more hardware. This is good if you want to create an embedded system with some obscure microcontroller.
But nobody choosing an operating system actually cares how many microprocessors are supported. They just care if their cpu is supported. And for 99.99% of the world, with linux, it is.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Unless it's the old bsd license it's not an issue. The old BSD license had an issue with the GPL, but it's not used much any more.
t .html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/license-list .html#GPLCompatibleLicenses
Compare orginal, and modifiedBSD licenses.
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/license-lis
IANALBIPOOGL (I am not a Lawyer, but I play one on GrokLaw.)
Your post correctly points out some of the things FreeBSD lacks - mainly things working "out of the box". As for you not being able to get those things working, that sucks. Might have been the flakiness if the earlier 5.x releases of FreeBSD - or maybe those areas of FreeBSD just aren't up to snuff.
I do recall having some misc. problems with 5.1/5.2 releases of FreeBSD, but they seem to have finally gotten it right with 5.4, which is my current desktop at home.
Still things generally do not work out of the box. I had to load the cam kernel module and do some config editing to get K3B to work as a non-root user, I still have to mount my USB thumb drive manually, and I had to rename a config file to get ethereal to compile correctly, I had to implement a shell script to get Firebox to talk to Thunderbird, and vice versa.
But now everything just works - *beautifully* I might add. portupgrade , portmanager and portsnap together make maintaining ports as simple as running two simple commands from time to time.
It would be much easier to just install linux, but I like the feeling of BSD, and I LOVE the FreeBSD documentation. All of the issues I described above (except for the Firefox/Thunderbird issue) were covered in the documentation of either FreeBSD *or* the ports that were involved, and I've never run into a piece of BSD related documentation that I couldn't follow, or was flat out wrong.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.