Yet Another BSD vs Linux article

Lazaru5 writes "Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel wrote this article for the Boston Globe Online Business section. " It's something of an incendiary article, but I think it's great to see the amount of press that *BSD has been getting lately.

Comments

Not Too Bad

[Aaron M. Renn]

Not too bad an article. There's nothing wrong with advocacy, or saying you like something. A couple points though:

-- BSD is not a decendant of the GNU Project. It uses some GNU tools such as gcc, but largely it has an independent lineage.

-- Stability and security. This is the same thing Linux partisans talked about for a long time. The reply was always, "but what about applications and support". Now with the commericalization of Linux, it's the Linux camp bragging about apps and support. This is really where Linux has an edge today.

Commercialism? & CatB & Worse Is Better

[HenryFlower]

I find the implication that Linux is overcomercialized somewhat ironic, since the BSD license is supposed to be more friendly to comercial use.

The contrast between BSD and Linux is the contrast between the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Clearly, Linux development is more anarchic, and one might expect that BSD would have some temporary advantages because of that. However, Richard Gabriel wrote an interesting essay, Worse is Better, explaining why C and Unix had overtaken Lisp, etc. The title is somewhat facetious but the observation is a fine one. The key point (missed, I think, by Gabriel), is not that the weaknesses of C vs. Lisp contributed to its success, but that the "get it working, then get it right" nature, and the openness of C and Unix let it evolve and reach perfection faster than striving for absolute perfection right off would have.

Both approaches have a good deal of merit, and one is not more right than the other. However, I would suspect that Linux will advance at a faster rate than BSD. Perhaps not always in useful directions, perhaps not always doing the One Right Thing, but over time, it will get there.

Nit Picking

[Jordy]

Sigh, why do these articles always have such blatent "bending" of the truth? :)

While Linux can only run on a few kinds of computers, NetBSD can run on more than 22...

Currently Linux is actively developed for Alpha, ARM, IA64, x86 (IA32), PPC, MIPS, m68k, and sparc(64). There is also a sh3 port, but I'm not sure how active it is (9 architectures).

NetBSD currently runs on Alpha, m68k, ARM, PPC, ix86 (IA32), MIPS, ns32k, sh3, sparc(64), and vax (10 architectures).

Note these are chip architectures, the "kinds of computers" is much larger. Under NetBSD there are explicit ports to different computers running the same chip, for instance a macppc port and a ofppc port even though they both use PowerPC chips. Linux doesn't differentiate ports like this, so it would appear that Linux is ported to far less machines than NetBSD.

Earlier this year there were a number of well-publicized security problems involving the Linux operating system. During that time my computer was frequently attacked. However, since I wasn't running Linux, I wasn't vulnerable. Linux is the favored operating system for most of the attackers on the Internet, which is another reason I don't use it.

99.5% (give or take) of all exploits for the Linux OS are distribution binary exploits, not kernel exploits.

This means that if you had SSH installed on your box and a security announcement regarding SSH on Linux was put out, chances are you would be vulnerable as well. The real difference is that exploit code examples for Linux are far more common than for *BSD.

I would almost say though that a lot of the daemons *BSD uses are typically higher quality than what the Linux world uses, but nothing really stops someone from packaging say an OpenBSD FTP server with a Linux distribution (I believe Debian does now).

All can run most programs that are written for Linux, and frequently they can run the programs faster than Linux itself.

I've seen this argument a lot, but I have yet to see a benchmark performed on any modern kernel. The last benchmark I saw as for a 1.2.x kernel which was quite a while ago.

If I had to pick out the single difference between the BSD community as a whole and the proponents of Linux, I would say it is something called ''correctness.'' The BSD developers are more concerned that the underlying technology in their operating systems be implemented in a manner consistent with the overall design of the systems. Linux developers, overall, are more interested in just putting together something that works.

Linus Torvalds is one of the most anal retentive people on this planet (no offense Linus). You see him all the time rejecting patches because of poor architecture design. Of course, he only handles (for the most part) the intel port & generic linux system, but the other subsystem heads are just as bad.

Really, unless you are a kernel developer (ie, you've had patches accepted), you really can't begin to understand the pain and torture that one has to go through to get a patch accepted, especially when they implement new features :)

Really, when it all comes down to it, how different is Linux from *BSD? I mean, if you took a *BSD system and stuck a Linux kernel instead of a *BSD kernel and changed any type of incompatibilities... would you think it still inferior?

Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong :)

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