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.

Comments

Loving my FreeBSD-3.3 RC #3 Box

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no doubt that I am fervently in favor of the growing popularity of linux, but I have to say I am an unabashed fan of my ever-so-lovingly tweaked FreeBSD box. Whats to love?

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.

Factual issues

[gr]

First off, let me say that it's good to see an article even addressing these issues in the Wall Street Journal, and as one poster said, they did a pretty good job for mainstream media. That said, the author tries to go into details and teach a history that he actually doesn't know, and that some /. readers also may not know, because it's pretty convoluted. These are arguably minor points, but I think they're important.

The BSD programs and Linux actually share a common lineage, a collective development process and a rambunctious cast of characters.

The free programs are all variants of the venerable Unix system invented by AT&T Corp.

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:

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.

... but I'm not sure that really clarifies things for the average reader, and has some factual failings of its own (Linus wrote a kernel, not an operating system, and operating system needs basic software, Gnu had it, we all know the drill and the fanatics involved).

OpenBSD was started in 1995 by Theo de Raadt, a mountain biking 31-year-old Canadian after being kicked out of the NetBSD movement.

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.