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The BSDs in the WSJ: "Help Build the Web"
conio writes "The Wall Street Journal published an article on Friday about the open-source BSDs (mainly FreeBSD) and how they're silently serving the Net. " This was submitted yesterday quite a bit, but was in the pay area-thankfully it's free reading now. Good to see BSD get some of the limelight.
hmm.. well, I'm not quite sure about that. From my understanding, only the Berkeley code was stripped of the advertisement. On the rest of the BSD code, which is everything else, it either has the clause or doesn't.
Sure, now the BSD networking code is largly free, due to UCB. But, Berkeley didn't write all the code in NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD, did they? Others tacked on their varient of the clause, while others took it off entirely.
On the GNU website where they recomend the GPL over the BSDL (obviously was slightly updated due to the p.3 removal), they like to give their propiganda speeches, etc. I'm already a bit disgusted of the GNU project from just reading that.. but that's just becuase I don't see them as freedom fighters, more of lobbyists.
What they say there, if you go read, is that FreeBSD agreed to change once it was asked of them (I find that shows the maturity of the people on BSD side), etc. That doesn't mean everyone uses the new BSDL, many have their varient.
I also don't want to start a big war (would be fun if others were up to discussing it in a rational, logical way), on whether the clause was better or not. In some ways, I think it was a protection against the GPL'ing of BSD, which snobby zealots like to talk about, saying they'd love to create another fork, etc. GPL'ing for the good of the community I can understand and be behind, but I really can't imagine anyone being that grown up to do it.
And people already are working on it. Some take BSD code and submit it to the GPL groups (this happened in reverse once. I (believe) it was NetBSD that accidentally had GPL code in it and they immediately removed it. Its nice GNU didn't laugh at them and force the rest of the surrounding code GPL'd). Others claim they are working on removing any code with clause 3 in FreeBSD and GPL'ing it (someone from CMU said they were doing this (on slashdot). True or not, some one s bound to try). It just goes on, and on...
But your right, it would be the true test. And I really can't see it as helping BSD. I would suspect that once its GPL'd, the popularity of Linux means it will be imbedded in that system. Insead of BSD getting better, it will be leeched for its treasures. Linux will get better, Linux will get the credit, Linux will get the publicity, Linux will get the developers, and BSD will be hurt. Its legal, but its disrespectful to the groups.
It would be just like going to a user/news group and starting a license flame war. It was done to piss them off, to show that you can, and the thrill (I believe) is your going into their homes and and trying to demean them. Its really quite childish, which I think over the year both sides have basicly admitted to and try to stop it. But GPL'ing BSD code just to do it and put it in Linux is the same. At least that's my opinion, others may disagree.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
>didn't the *bsd flavors of unix had what, 20 years to get their act togethe
Act together? Hrmmm, considering Sun (perhaps you have heard of them) BUILT their company on the back of BSD, it looks like the BSD act has been together for some time.
OR how every major Unix has BSD compatibility libs?
Apple is using BSD in their Mac OS X.
IBM is using BSD in thier thin client, and the InterJet.
(are you willing to say that neither Apple nor IBM have their act together?)
And a bonus clue for your flamebait:
Linus is on record as saying that *IF* AT&T wasn't suing BSD, there would not be Linux...he would have been using BSD.
Back to the de-bunking:
>Then came linux and now the *bsd users have had it and are beginning to come around. I applaud
them for selling and marketing and creating hype about there product which is what they should of
done 20 years ago.
Repeat after me.
BSD before 4.4 had AT&T licened code.
Do you UNDERSTAND what that means? It means that only ACEDEMICS could afford a AT&T source licence for AT&T.
Do you grasp that to distribute the BSD code, you as the user would have to pay AT&T? And pay them a figure over $5,000. $5000 is a few dollars more than the cheapbytes price for the BSD release.
>Linux said that linux is made up of 30 full time and
over 1,000 part time programmers who work on the kernel while freebsd has only 15 guys.
Errr and exactly WHERE are these numbers from?
>I believe the *bsd
group should go gnu to compete with linux.
Hrmmmm. If that were to happen then Apple, IBM (Thin client, whitle and whomever else they have), the 3 man shop in Milwaukee imbedding BSD, and a whole host of others who work on the kernel and submit changes would all just go away. (Wow. When you Add in Apple and IBM it seems like a whole lot more than 15 people work on BSD. Are you getting the feeling that your 'reasons' are less and less reasonable?)
Whatever happened to the idea that differences make the whole stronger?
But, from your post, the whole OpenSource community doesn't enter into your view of the world.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
20 years ago, you had to get a license from AT&T to get BSD, as large parts of the code in BSD were based on AT&T UNIX code that hadn't been replaced. They weren't out for World Domination at that point - but, then, Linus Torvalds wasn't our for World Domination when he started working on his kernel, either, as far as I know....
There may well be *BSD hackers who are pissed at Linux users and the whole computer world for appearing to ignore them, but
To what extent did the Linux community "market it, sell it, and create hype about it"? And where did the "marketing, selling, and hype" about Linux come from? I'm not sure it all came from "the Linux hackers".
FreeBSD (and the other freely-available BSDs) have always run on PCs, as I think FreeBSD and NetBSD both came from 386BSD which was a port of Net-2 to, err, umm, the PC.
The first attempt at a completely-free BSD (with all the AT&T code either replaced or blessed as "OK to give out") was, I think, 386BSD, whence came FreeBSD and NetBSD; the "386" in "386BSD" referred to the 80386, because it was a BSD port to the PC.
"The *bsd group" of those days was the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and they certainly did accept contributions from outsiders. However, not all the stuff Sun, SGI, IBM, etc. did with either AT&T UNIX code or BSD code was necessarily sent back to Berkeley by those companies, and not because the Berkeley folk wouldn't accept it. You can't solely blame Berkeley for the existence of N different flavors of UNIX....
That all happened well before the early 1990's; UNIX was well-fragmented by the mid 1980's, with several different proprietary variants, from vendors who largely sold it on their own boxes rather than on, say, IBM-compatible PCs - UNIXes for PCs had existed for a long time, but I don't know how well IN/ix ran on 8088-based PC's (yes, 8088, the one with segmentation but no memory protection), but I suspect it may not have run well enough to push DOS out of the way, and I suspect the same may have been true of the UNIXes for 286-based PCs, although I think Xenix (yes, the Borg's own UNIX, later handed to SCO) may have had a decent market share for small business computers and the like.
"The *bsd crowd", if by that you mean the folks at Berkeley and their successors on the {Free,Net,Open}BSD projects, weren't spearheading the commercial UNIX movement - as far as I know, they were building free OSes for their own purposes, which I think was largely what the Linux community was also doing when they started.
Said market was the commercial UNIX market, not the free UNIX "market"....
Linux has software companies distributing it; for whatever reason, there's no equivalent of Red Hat or SuSE or Caldera or Pacific HiTech or... filling that role for {Free,Net,Open}BSD (no, Walnut Creek CD-ROM isn't in that position, as far as I know), although there is BSDI selling BSD/OS.
"The *bsd community", if, by that, you mean the developers of {Free,Net,Open}BSD is probably more like the Debian community than like Red Hat or SuSE or... in that regard (although the Debian folk aren't necessarily the official "owners" of all the components that go into their distribution - they're the official source of versions of the kernel, libraries, utilities, etc. that go into a Debian release, but they're not the official home of the Linux kernel or GNU "libc" or...).
The FreeBSD Core Team does have 16 members, but the core team, as the list linked to say, "constitutes the project's ``Board of Directors'', responsible for deciding the project's overall goals and direction as well as managing specific areas of the FreeBSD project landscape" - they're not the sole developers of FreeBSD code. The same probably applies to NetBSD and OpenBSD. There are 151 additional "FreeBSD Developers" "who have commit privileges and do the engineering work on the FreeBSD source tree", and, according to the Contributing to FreeBSD page in the FreeBSD Handbook
Again, the same may be true of NetBSD and OpenBSD; I'm less familiar with those projects.
I don't know how many of the core team or the development team work full-time on FreeBSD, so I can't say that FreeBSD has 167 full-time and (some unknown number of) part-time developers (the latter being those who don't have commit privileges but who do contribute code) - and note that this does not say that FreeBSD has more people working on it than are working on Linux systems, as I don't know if those "30 full time people" counts only people working on the kernel or also counts people working on GNU "libc", GNU utilities that aren't also used in the BSDs, etc..
However, it does suggest that "freebsd has only 15 guys" is a big oversimplification.
There could well be more people working on the stuff that goes into a Linux distribution and that doesn't also go into the BSDs or that isn't also available for BSD (people working on XFree86 aren't "Linux developers", as their stuff goes into the BSDs as well, and the folks working on KDE, at least, aren't "Linux developers", either, as binary packages of KDE 1.1.1 are available for FreeBSD and possibly the other BSDs) than are working on FreeBSD, but this doesn't mean that FreeBSD, or any of the other BSDs, are ipso facto doomed.
12 years before today is 1987; FreeBSD didn't exist then, and Linux didn't just show up today, so FreeBSD wasn't around 12 years longer than Linux. Much of the BSD code was around before Linux existed, but much of the GNU and other code that goes into a Linux distribution was around before Linux existed as well, so I'm not sure {Free,Net,Open}BSD had as big a head start as you seem to think (it did have one, as far as I know, but not a 12 year head start).
That may be your definition of OS.
It is not my definition of OS.
Yes, any application running on a system with a UNIX-flavored system call interface and APIs implemented atop that could, in theory, be written solely using system calls by replacing all the non-system-call APIs by reimplementations of those APIs.
However:
so I don't consider "an OS is the software that runs in kernel mode" a particularly useful definition (especially given that there may well be machines that have a more fine-grained privilege level than just kernel vs. user).
I'm not sure what the right definition of "OS" is, but I tend to consider anything that, if removed, would keep the system from running usefully to be part of the OS, which means that, at a minimum, that includes, on a modern UNIX-flavored system, init, the shell that runs the "rc" files, the commands run from the "rc" files as distributed and configured by system installation, and the shared libraries with which those programs are linked - and if that brings in "libc", well, the "libc" in most Linux distributions is either derived from a GNU "libc" or is a GNU "libc", so....
Yes, some of the stuff that falls into that category may also run on other systems, but I don't consider that sufficient reason to consider it "not part of the OS" on a system where it's a standard component of that system - GNU "libc" isn't "part of the OS" if the system has its own "libc", but if the system's "libc" is GNU "libc", I consider that a different matter.
"The free programs are all variants of the venerable Unix system invented by AT&T Corp. And they aren't just running Yahoo. While Microsoft almost never talks about it, its own Hotmail free e-mail service runs not on its flagship Windows NT but on FreeBSD."
I wouldn't want to talk about either, since when Microsoft first acquired Hotmail, they switched over all the servers to Windows NT. Needless to say, their setup experienced mild "difficulties" as NT tried to handle the all the user load, and failed.. miserably.. After a short period (not short enough for many, I'm sure) they were forced to switch back. And they call their systems "advanced"?
"The Linux saga is already the stuff of modern legend. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student in Helsinki, began writing an operating system essentially from scratch so he could have something to use on his home computer. The programs FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, by contrast, are the descendants of code written in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley."
Oh please. No matter how technically accurate or inaccurate the media is, they always leave out some important aspects. I know I sound like a broken record, but I feel as if this is an important issue which needs to be addressed. Is there any way we can let the media know that we have GNU/Linux today because of both the GNU Project and Linus Torvalds, and not just Linus? Public perception is a big deal.. the only thing people listen to are just PR issues, anyway. Any insights on this? I don't believe I've heard of any before.
Ugh. Just killed article window. Too lazy to reopen. Hmm.. "no ego about letting people use their software"? I think I got that right, and it sounds egotistical in and of itself. What, GNU/Linux was all written by just one person? Ha!
~ Kish
I don't think this is correct. Since you can already take the code and stick it into whatever you want, proprietary or otherwise, there is no reason whatsoever that you could not redistribute it under the GPL. You're not changing the copyright; you're just adding licensing terms, which the BSD license allows you to do.
The biggest obstacle in the past was the advertising clause, but even that is being removed now.
As for why some people think this would be a good idea, this is my guess:
People have many theories as to why Linux has achieved the popularity among users and companies that it has. Usually among these theories is the idea that volunteer programmers are more likely to contribute to a project that forbids the proprietarization of their code than to one that does not. This may or may not be true; it's a tough one to prove.
So, if you buy that theory, the thought goes...by going to the GPL, BSD would lose some hackers (the hard-core BSDL advocates), but pick up more in return. Of course, it's just that a theory, and an untested one at that. I don't really know that things would work out that way. A reasonable counter argument is that there are only so many hackers of the GPL persuasion, and Linux is already using those resources.
My guess is that with the removal of the advertising clause, someone is going to try to start a GPL BSD project. That will be the true test; we'll just see how many developers they pick up, and whether developers are lost from Linux, the BSDs, or neither.
--
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What some OpenBSD zealots forget is just how much cross development goes on between OpenBSD and FreeBSD. All of the holes found in FreeBSD in the last two weeks were found by Ra'daat in openbsd first. However the FreeBSD guys quickly fixed them. Besides which it would take 3 years at this exploit pace to come even close to the number of exploits linux has had. And we dont all use FreeBSD just because it is more secure than linux. It is more secure but the reason I use it is stability. Both in the crash sense and in the interface sense. I also use it for the ease of administration. Things stay the same and the update path makes sense. Linux has none of those features. I also use FreeBSD because I dont like the fact that there are some 42 linux distributions out there none of who can agree on how things should work. There is only one FreeBSD and I like that alot.
-sirket
Ask Linus about this. The reason we couldn't "be" is because BSD was the subject of a lawsuit. I believe Linus can be quoted as saying that if such lawsuit did not exist, neither would Linux.
More FUD. See the core team list and the FreeBSD CVS committers list. Both of these groups of people can commit directly to the CVS repository, effecting what people use in FreeBSD directly. No permission from God (Linus) or Co-God (Alan) is necessary under FreeBSD. Additionally, many people use the send-pr facility to submit patches to repair software in FreeBSD. One of the people listed in the core team or committers will then respond, and if it is "OK", the patch supplied is committed (perhaps with modifications) to the source tree.
Also, FreeBSD consists of both userland (/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin) and kernel. Since they're all kept in one place, both are constantly and consistently updated. I find this to be very beneficial to FreeBSD.
Apple and I am sure some other big names are behind BSD too. I think Apple chose BSD over Linux for MacOS X because:
a) NexT was already using some flavor of BSD
b) the BSD license let them make proprietary extensions without having to release the source.
So with Darwin (the kernel used by MacOS X client & server) you have the BSD & Mach based kernel/core, and at the top of that Apple will put their proprietary technology (Mac GUI, Quicktime, etc etc.)
I'm not sure if they could do that with a Linux or another GPLed OS.
Janus
Why is that?
I read the article, and liked it.
These journalists have come a long way since the "UNIX has no GUI" days. The article was entirely positive, written to give credit where it was due (I'm a Linux guy, btw).
The article wasn't posted to start a flame war, but that's going to happen anyway. It's already started.
It's like Ford vs. GM vs. whoever. Strong points, weak points, there are always reasons behind one's choice, and they're always valid.
The noise has only been getting worse, and it's extremely redundant.
These articles are *good*. Please accept that.
I haven't tried to use an ext2 partition under FreeBSD for over a year (two years?). When I did it wouldfrom time to time include random garbage as part of disk writes. This is a bad thing :)
:(
Linux is no friendlier to ufs. Compile your system with ufs support, and suddenly the ufs partition 3 slices appear before your ext2 partitions in partition 4, and you attempt to mount the ufs slices as ext2 partitions. KA-BLAM! Trashed partition tables when you go back to BSD. Even if you remember to move them, you'll probably forget about this some time when you pull out an old rescue disk, and BOOM.
Also, I found that FreeBSD would complain aobut the labels in the linux extended partitions, which caused a panic on boot about 20% of the time. I finally removed the linux extended partition.
Mmm, and just using UFS for shared partitions doesn't work, either. They don't get fsck'd properly under linux, and I couldn't find a way to manually fsck them.
The only filesystem that they both seem to get along with is dos. I finally resorted to tarballs on a dos partition to exchange files
1. Easy to harden. I have two ports open - X (6000, 6010) and SSH (22). It was very easy to get my box to this stage. Much easier than it was with RH 6.0, which I have also hardened.
2. Easy to upgrade. I have yet to see any tool surpass /usr/ports for pure ease of use. I cvsup my ports every night, and in the morning I check the logs to see what package have been tweaked and configured and are ready to be loaded up. Then once or twice I week I cvsup the source code for the OS and do a make world. Upgrading FreeBSD is very very easy - cvsup is gorgeous and I've found nothing like it.
3. Easy to play nice with linux. I can run linux binaries without recompiling. What else is there to say?
4. One distribution, great docs, great organization. FreeBSD.org maintains everything I need to deal with regarding the OS in a clear and concise manner. The FreeBSD handbook is available online. I get CD subscriptions multiple times a year, at a good price. I find the linux world of distros rather confusing. FreeBSD makes it easier for me to know the "source of truth".
Bravo to linux folks for making inroads into corporate America, and thanks to FreeBSD for a island of sanity in the OS archipeligo.
This is basically untrue. All four BSDs (including BSDi's BSD/OS) stem from the AT&T Unix sources, Linux was written entirely without access to those sources. It behaves similarly in a lot of ways, but vastly differently in others (arp and routing tables, for instance).
This isn't to say that either Unix/BSD's or Linux's way is better (I personally prefer the methods that have been around and proven for twenty-odd years, but that's me).
The author may have been trying to straighten out this mis-statement when he wrote:
Okay, so maybe Theo didn't leave NetBSD under the friendliest of circumstances, but to claim he was "kicked out" isn't really fair. He had disagreements about what the focus of the program should be, so he broke off to pursue the focus he felt was more important. This doesn't make either focus invalid, just points up the fact that you can't have one set of people focusing on both spreading platform support and securing all OS processes. The above comments imply that there's some kind of lasting enmity between the Open- and NetBSD projects, which simply isn't true.
All of this said, the point an earlier poster made about how this is a pretty good article, and that the mainstream media is doing a much better job than they once did is quite valid. I'm also gladdened to see this article wasn't just more slobbering over RedHat... I've seen quite enough of that to last me the rest of my days.
Do you have a
I love Linux, but the library incompatibilities not! That's a catastrophical issue that Debian seem to be taming somehow. Oh, and I don't like our little distro wars either!
In my company (it's a very huge neterprise) we are trying to estabilish a policy on using Linux in the labs. I have seen a lot of *BSD machines around, too, maybe as much as Linux hosts. However, noone seems to be supporting the *BSD people. They seem to be very quiet and just go along and use *BSD and not giving a dime about policies. Me being primarily a network man, I don't care that much if we use Linux or *BSD, I only care to find all the OSPF and BGP routing features on the platfor. The more TCP/IP management programs, the better. So far, *BSD has proved to be more useful to us. So I wish the *BSD people here could push with more force, even though I use Linux more.
Sigged!
Uses disklabel instead of partitions. Basically all of freebsd's partitions are extended partitions. Pain in the ass reading them in linux (I just gave up trying to mount one), but overall a rather nice feature.
Had to hand-edit a config file of nasty little abbreviated names to configure the kernel for reinstall. That just wasn't terribly fun.
No configurator/wizard for ppp, had to pretty much set that up by hand. Didn't take me long, but it sure was a speedbump.
Had some funny ideas about its root device when booted, had to fiddle with the boot loader to get it working. Comes up so often it's a FAQ, but maybe it should install the boot loader with the right parameters to begin with. Just a minor problem tho, and probably what i get for installing it on a secondary slave IDE drive in the first place.
Ports are great, but it also has a package manager that looked adequate at any rate. KDE installed as a package, worked nicely out of the box.
Now I'm wondering, will I be able to use the GLX 3d driver for my TNT card, and can I get sblive support for freebsd? I don't play many games on linux, but I like the possibility, and I do play the occasional mods or mp3's through it. Oh I wasn't too thrilled how aha152x support is specifically left out of the later kernels BTW. I know it's a crappy card, but I don't see it interfering with anything.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
FUD, you ask? Yes!
FreeBSD also allows binary package installation.
$ pkg_add ftp//:url_to_package
This is nonsense. Package management has nothing to do with the /etc directory. FreeBSD uses CVSup for that, and there is an excellent port which can update /etc for you automagically called mergemaster.
FreeBSD also has gradual binary upgrades for both the -STABLE and -CURRENT systems known as "snapshots". See ftp://current.freebsd.org.
What gives you this idea? I've got a whole lot of ports I've preserved across many dozens of FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT recompiles over several months:
- GIMP
- Many KDE apps (though I use GNOME mainly now)
- nmap
- The XFree86 stuff
- Window Maker
- Eterm
- pdksh
- vMac
- jade
- XAnim
etc...What's that feature you ask? Well, it's the small part of the user base that constantly has to say "my OS is better than yours."
Each has it's benifits, and among the ones I like best are Red Hat and FreeBSD. Advocating the benifits of one over another is pointless when it will only start a flame war. There is no match for ports in the Linux world, dselect and dpkg are not as tight or relyable or intuitive, and it's not compileing from source allowing complete optimization based on your /etc/make.conf file, so it's not comparing apples to apples, it's comparing apples to oranges. And, rpm also has a remote package get, btw, rpm -ivh ftp://site.org/path/to.rpm works fine.
The "tightness" and "tweakability" of FreeBSD is very good, and trying to say that Linux is better is shortsighted. Linux has a huge (yet unorginized, and frequently poorly documented) breath of applications that run native, and FreeBSD is still working to cetch up.
Can't we just agree to disagree, and admit there is a great deal of good in both OS's. Start drawing on eachothers strengths, and admit that the interoperability of UNIX in it's many varients is still less fragemented that the Microsoft and Mac world would like us to believe? Or must we continue to drive wedges between diffrent UNIX factions, and fragement ourselfs into oblivion like was done in the past?
"Only thing i want to know is, why is BSD a programme, and Linux an operating system, when *BSD is the kernel, and the libraries and the tools, and linux is just a kernel?"
Simple, Linux is the name of the kernel, operating system, and the name of most distributions. Likewise, FreeBSD is also the name of the kernel, OS and distro.
Now I'm sure that this will get me flames since I didn't mention GNU/Linux. So I will. GNU/Linux is the name of a distribution, namely that non-existant distribution provided by the FSF. When RMS started the GNU project, he didn't set out to create an OS. Instead he wanted to make an OS plus everything else needed for normal everyday use. To quote, "The GNU system includes programs that are not GNU software, programs that were developed by other people and projects for their own purposes, but which we can use because they are free software." Thus, RMS was creating what we today call "distributions." Create a small core OS (which isn't complete yet) and add to it the best of free software in every category.
Who ever puts it names it. The first Linux distribution was called "Linux", so that's why people continue to say it, when technically it should be "Redhat Linux", "Debian GNU/Linux", "SuSE Linux", or whatever else the makers named it.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I haven't seen any important BSD holes reported to Bugtraq lately. Most have been simple local DoS attacks, which are not really a problem unless you're a shell provider or have untrusted local users. None have been remote exploits, the only category of exploits that are really critical. Compare that to the Red Hat exploits over the last few weeks...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Using an accurate name is not "bad" because it upsets other people. It's not name-calling, it's simply an accurate name. I'd be more worried about the Linux kiddies and their "Microsucks winbloze" bullshit - that's immature name-calling.
If you'd prefer, I can refer to it as the GNU OS, since that's what it mostly is (and will be 100% whenever Hurd finally finishes and the Linux kernel can be replaced). Then, if people inquire, I can point out the detail that I use the Linux kernel along with my GNU OS.
Anyway, I presume you dislike Debian GNU/Linux for this reason. Red Hat user?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
So then why do Linux advocates compare the "Linux OS" to the "Windows NT OS"? Either you compare the "GNU/Linux OS" to the "Windows NT OS", or you compare the "Linux OS" to the "Win32 OS."
If the kernel is the OS, then I'd appreciate it if you start referring to the "Win32 OS" from now on.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, you say that "Debian" is an OS. However, there is no distribution called "Debian." It is called "Debian GNU/Linux." Therefore, it'd be the "Debian GNU/LInux OS." You seem to have just disproven your point.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You seem to have hit on the head what the BSD fans have been saying for a long time. BSD is for serious work, while Linux is for home users who are adventurous and, like yourself, have fun with library incompatibilities, distro wars, crap filesystems, etc.
And before somebody accuses me of being a BSD zealot, I use neither BSD nor Linux.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
How can you claim that the first distribution was named "Linux"? I haven't heard this before. Sure, the kernel is named Linux, but I see no evidence of there being a complete distribution being called simply "Linux." AFAIK, Linus himself has never created a distribution, just a kernel. All the distributions I've seen have been either "Somebody's GNU/Linux" or "Somebody's Linux," or homebrew systems built around the Linux kernel.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I haven't been following the vixie-cron thing extremely closely, but it was my understanding that the BSDs were not completely vulnerable. The vixie-cron bug itself still existed, but the method of exploit was through sendmail, and the BSDs have fixed these sendmail problems, while most GNU/Linux distributions have not.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"How can you claim that the first distribution was named "Linux"?"
SLS, Yggdrasil, et al., were all called "Linux". The name "GNU/Linux" didn't arrive until the FSF started to put together a distribution (Debian), which later went independent.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
How many slashdoters does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Exactly Five Hundred: 1 to change the light bulb and to post to slashdot that the light bulb has been changed 7 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently. 4 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs. 17 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs. 21 to flame the spell checkers 49 to write to the modorator complaining aboutthe light bulb discussion and its inappropriateness 20 to correct spelling in the spelling/grammar flames. 32 to post that this topic is not about light bulbs and to please take this email exchange to alt.lite.bulb 69 to demand that cross posting to alt.grammar, alt.spelling and alt.punctuation about changing light bulbs be stopped. 41 to defend the posting to this topic saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts **are** relevant to this topic. 106 to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best for this technique, and what brands are faulty. 12 to post URLs where one can see examples of different light bulbs 8 to post that the URLs were posted incorrectly, and to post corrected URLs. 2 to post about links they found from the URLs that are relevant to this topic which makes light bulbs relevant to this topic. 15 to concatenate all posts to date, then quote them including all headers and footers, and then add pointedly, "Me Too." 6 to post to the list that they are not visiting slashdot because they cannot handle the light bulb controversy. 9 to quote the "Me Too's" and happily add, "Me Three"3 to suggest that posters request the light bulb FAQ. 1 to propose new slashdot topic. 24 to say this is just what www.bugtraq.org was meant for, leave it here. 53 votes for slashdot.org