OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?

Norsefire writes "I am in quite a predicament. I decided a while back to branch out and use a new operating system (currently running Debian). After a bit of searching (trying Gentoo, Gobo and Arch along the way), I decided to use something that isn't Linux. Long story short: I narrowed the choices down to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, but now I'm stuck. OpenSolaris is commercially backed by Sun, has nice enterprise-y tools in the default install, and best of all, a mature implementation of ZFS. FreeBSD is backed by a foundation, has a minimal default install and a rather new (but recently improved in the 8.0 release) implementation of ZFS, however it offers the Ports Collection (I quite like the performance boost due to compiling from source, no matter how small it might be) and a bigger community than OpenSolaris. That is just a minimal mention of the differences. I would be interested to see what the Slashdot community thinks of these two operating systems."

Comments

Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't.

[AlexLibman]

Restrictive (copyleft) licensed software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain indeed follows a communist philosophy that fails to see the value of free market competition, and instead relies on government force (see gpl-violations.org).

Public domain software is ideal, but the most permissive (least restrictive) FLOSS software stack you can get today would be based on minimalist "cover our legal butts" licenses like BSD. Other great permissive software includes Apache, PostgreSQL, Python, LLVM, X, vim, libtorrent, the Xiph codecs, and so on. Major kudos to Google for releasing Chromium under the BSD license, which for the first time in history finally makes a decent 100% free software desktop possible!

The Windows Interix subsystem could have evolved into a great UNIX server platform, but socialist governments (especially in Europe) place severe restrictions on what Microsoft can include in their products, which is the only thing holding them back. There has been some effort to get Gentoo's portage or NetBSD's pkgsrc working on it, but it never got off the ground. It seems like the open source community is ostracising Interix for purely irrational anti-capitalist reasons, and that's really a shame - it could have brought the power of UNIX to the >90% of users who run Windows! (Yes, there's also Cygwin, but it's embarrassingly slow, buggy, and incomplete.)

As Stallman's economic fallacies become ever more evident, I expect ever-more developer time to shift to 100% free (non-copyleft) software, which means there's a very bright long-term future ahead for platforms like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, NewForkBSD, and even MINIX 4!

Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't.

[nxtw]

Interix was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX

Do you have any proof?

However, there is nothing they could do to stop the Windows community from doing the port. The reason it's not happening is because Microsoft and Microsoft collaborators aren't interested in becoming helpful collaborating members of the community.

What would you consider the SUA community?

Which leads to the question why didn't Microsoft just go ahead and fix it. Answer; because then it would be difficult to kill it later. Interix might be a sane choice for an organisation which was trying to eliminate old UNIX installs and just had a few applications which were difficult to rewrite at the current time.

I think this is the target audience: organizations who want to run UNIX applications on Windows in a supported way. It's probably not indented for people who want a complete GNU system. (Recent packages ship with GCC and GDB, but otherwise come with BSD or SVR4-derived utilities.)

Some of the other systems you mentioned should be, logically, looking at their design and historical position before Linux really took off and the number of products developed from them which could have contributed to their develomement dominating the market. However they have failed. The reason is simple. Every time someone comes up with a product based on a non copyleft system (OS-X; JunOS, Microsoft's TCP/IP stack, IPSO etc. etc.) the community divides between those working on the product and those working on the OS

Surely the BSD lawsuit had something to do with Linux taking off instead of BSD?

Compare with Linux where the majority of contributions actually come from commercial organisations where the GPL has allowed those organisations to stay in the community instead of being forced to fork.

Many of these contributions come from organizations that have an interest of advancing Linux in general.
But some organizations that do use Linux and GNU software don't contribute much back - consider many of the consumer electronics devices that run GPL software, such as consumer broadband routers. Some provide the source as required by the GPL, but not much else - for example, the Linux source used might be available, but the wifi driver might be a binary module. These organizations don't really stay in the community or fork; they provide the GPL source code for whatever they use, including the modifications.

These organizations use GPL software because it's cheaper; their "contributions" to the community might amount to being mostly useless to anyone, or only useful to those who want to hack the devices the software runs on. What exactly am I going to do with the GPL source code used by my TV, for example?

Re:Article is trollbait

[Norsefire]

I knew when I was composing this question that someone would accuse it of being trolling or flamebait, this is the internet after all and any attempt to compare things on the internet must be trolling, right?

You have been trolled.

Nope. They are the distros I tried. Gentoo for its compiled-from-source nature, Gobo for its new approach on the filesystem, and Arch because it was recommended that I try it. All had their hangups but if I was sticking with Linux I would probably use Arch.

Still trolled by gentoo -O flag weenies, aren't we?

I also like setting compile-time options, applying patches etc. that you can't do with packages.

This is a good choice

Yeah ... but I feel like a change :-)

No, just no, not unless you have a specific reason to. As a desktop? They don't call it Slowaris for nothing, y'know.

Now who's trolling/flambating?

Well, it is Sun, after all. They did write the bloody thing. But don't forget that ZFS has its own overhead, so if you don't have a use for it, you're wasting your time and your system resources.

I have plenty of use for ZFS, it was one the main factors in narrowing my choice down to FreeBSD and OSOL.

Why? Not unless you have a specific reason to. You're already running a stable operating system that works on your hardware. Have you looked to see if the drivers you want are available? If it supports your hardware, go for it. If not, why put yourself through hell?

I have both OSOL and FreeBSD installed already. But there's only one of me so I can't use both. So I wanted to see what the general opinion about those two was.

Doesn't make any difference, bro, unless you are trying to start a flamewar. It either does what you want or it's crap.

No it doesn't, I was merely mentioning some differences.

[picking a fight over a socialist sig]

[AlexLibman]

Mafia theft... err... "taxes" don't "pay for civilization", civilization comes from voluntary cooperation between self-interested individuals that occurs in the free market! Read Murray Rothbard, David Friendman, and other free market philosophers. The government is a violent and effectively unaccountable monopoly that has clipped the wings of human civilization, and may bring it to a screeching dystopian halt if not debunked and dismantled by the end of this century!

The truth shall set you free

[Anonymous Coward]

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save *BSD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying

Re:Performance boost?

[drinkypoo]

And for, perhaps, 4-5 packages that you may want to recompile with highest optimizations possible, well - that's what the source packages are there for.

Uh, yeah, that was my point. There's little to no point to rebuilding the whole system, since it only makes a difference for a handful of applications. And I explicitly mentioned previously that you could build your own debian packages... In fact, I have stuff on a PPA. So what were you trying to say again?

Re:Go the whole hog...

[TheRaven64]

Haiku is not multi-user and in this day and age of malware, that's absolutely essential

No it isn't. Sandboxing and process isolation are essential. Multi-user is something you can implement if you have these features, but the Haiku team chose not to.

Why not Linux

[assertation]

I don't want to start a religious war, but why not Linux?