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PC-BSD: The Most Beginner Friendly OS
soniyea writes "OSWeekly.com reviews PC-BSD and considers it the most beginner friendly OS in the market. 'From PC-BSD's roadmap to their default installation, I honestly feel good about where these guys are headed with their take on FreeBSD. This operating system has it all: support both from the professional level as well as that of the community, the ability to install Linux software, thanks to the binary compatibility layer, and of course — speed. Understand for most people, the speed factor is more or less a matter of opinion. But I have found that in some areas, it felt faster at the core level. Maybe I just had too much coffee that day? Either way, I totally recommend PC-BSD for anyone wanting to take a step into the wild side. FreeBSD, it's not just for geeks anymore.'"
If Linux was licenced under the BSD, we would have as many versions of the kernel as we have distributions. If the BSD licence is so great, then why the (multiple forks) of BSD haven't killed proprietary software by now? What killed commercial versions of Unix was the fragmentation, what makes Linux so strong is the union forced by the GPL.
Forking a project with the GPL usually doesn't cause a lasting division, eventually everyone will come back together under the branch that the majority considers "best". Ironically, the BSD licence, despite allowing more freedom for commercial companies, hasn't produced the best results commercially. Where is the commercial Unix based on the BSD? Other than specialized embedded OSes, general purpose commercial Unix based on BSD is the closest thing to dead that exists in the market today.
commercial usage ... proprietary usage. Big difference.
Not as big as you imagine. In most cases, commercial products for public release must be proprietary, either through naïve stockholder beliefs about security or business positioning, or due to NDA with related parties. Remember the Matrox and NVidia driver gap? Those companies weren't refusing to vend to Linux to be obstinant, and both companies were willing to address even smaller markets, like the Macintosh (before the mac users get up in arms, please remember that very few Mac users upgrade their video cards; in terms of sales, video card upgrades to the Linux market are a far larger market.) They just weren't able to satisfy the Linux market, because the Linux market has completely hedged itself into its dogma, and refuses to play well with anyone who works differently.
Did you ever wonder why, if there are two products, one BSD or MIT licensed and one GPL licensed, and when the BSD or MIT licensed product is inferior, the BSD or MIT product has invariably won within two years? It's because corporations aren't these mysterious dark villains you imagine them to be, and they're not stupid. Corporations understand collaboration; it reduces costs dramatically. Corporations donate more source than individuals do, and if you're going to argue that, please remember that you're not running Hurd yet. I run a corporation which makes Nintendo DS games. There are a ton of libraries I'd love to use, but because of my NDAs with Nintendo and some appallingly bad choices of wording in the LGPL, I'm simply not able to. I've had to skip dozens of awesome interface toolkits because they're simply unavailable to me. There are nineteen web browsers I've been able to find which will compile on the Nintendo DS. Exactly one of them is commercially available: KHTML. It's nothing short of a miracle that it happens to be the best choice; that's rarely true.
Wish you had PicoGUI games? So do I. Nano-X's codebase is a mess, and wxUniversal has performance and feature problems. PicoGUI is faster, prettier and compiles without problems. It skins, it scales, and the default skin is just gorgeous.
It's also a dead project, because the author lost interest and it never gained enough momentum. If it wasn't LGPL, I would personally resurrect and dramatically extend it; it would be far less work than starting over. Unfortunately, it's LGPL. Nobody's touched it since mid-2003. It's a beautiful project. And, because of its choice of license, it's dead, probably forever, while the dramatically inferior Nano-X project continues happily along, because companies can put their weight behind it.
I stand by my opinion, which I continue to repeat openly: GPL/LGPL are the paired most destructive forces in open source software today. The unix way is interoperability and cross-usability. The specific purpose of the GPL is to destroy that, and the LGPL, though it wants to be different, fails to be different. Unix has always been a genuinely free product, available to anyone who wanted it. It was originally a commercial product, and was released by corporations to the public freely.
GPL is an abomination. It's a bunch of programmers who think that just because they have the ethical right to tell companies to screw off, that it's suddenly a good idea. What they fail to understand is that they're taking from the mouths of the people who gave it to them in the first place, and from the mouths of the people who do the vast bulk of software development today. Yes, it's your right to constrain your work however you want to, and I will honor that. I will not respect it, however, and I will call you small-minded to your face. I will leave your software in your hands because you refuse to share, all the while banging the open source drum. But you know what? Real open source is open to everyone, and has been for decades before GNU reared its ugly head.
GPL is a major lose, and i
StoneCypher is Full of BS