[PLUG] Switching from Linux ?

Jeff Schwaber jschwaber at wesleyan.edu
Wed Apr 23 21:20:02 UTC 2003


> be like.  Also, what licenses does one get into with BSD?  I'd rather

Generally the same licenses you get into with Linux, as there's very
little in the way of medium or large projects that compile on only one.
The BSD License is just as major a license as the GPL, and many projects
that are commonly used under Linux are licensed with the BSD license.
Linux's TCP stack is based on BSD's (as is most of the world).

references: BSD License:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php

A few projects you might have heard of licensed under the BSD license:
TCL (scripting language that spawned/is related to TK, a widget toolkit)
Webmin (a web interface I use to admin my Linux boxen)
Enlightenment (a window manager, rather well known)
Blackbox (another window manager, also rather well known)
Freetype (truetype font replacement, used by most Linux dists)
SWIG (used by Perl, Python, Ruby, etc to provide access to modules
written in C/C++. If you use any scripting language, you probably use
SWIG)

That's just a brief list culled from the first five pages of
www.sourceforge.net 's list of BSD-licensed projects.

Note: BSD is an OSI-supported license, in other words, it is indeed Open
Source.

> GNU is building a standard environment for what a person should see
> in a source package, how about BSD?  Linux is Posix compliant,
> is BSD?  Linux is also clustering ready, I don't know about BSD.
> The other thing with BSD is that developement could be stymied 
> compared to Linux.

Yes, and the GNU tools are mostly platform agnostic*: that's why you
have to write Debian GNU/Linux, because GNU is NOT the same thing as
Linux. GNU tools compile on Linux, as they compile on BSD, and others.
BSD is Posix compliant, clustering ready (has native cluster solutions).
And I'm not sure what "that development could be stymied compared to
Linux."

reference: Here's FreeBSD's cluster mailing list:
 http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-cluster 

FreeBSD has a 4 stable version and a 5 stable-experimental version,
which is the coming version but has only been out a year or so and is
therefore still in more active development. In fact, FreeBSD is far more
conservative than Linux in releases--stable to FreeBSD means proven
stable in production environment, unlike Linux where 2.4.0 is "stable"
(ever run it?) FreeBSD has run many gigantic sites: Hotmail was Apache
on FreeBSD before Microsoft converted it to Win2k. In fact, the
benchmarks generally show FreeBSD with Apache to be faster and more
stable than Linux with Apache.

While on the topic of *BSD, you should check out OpenBSD, the most
secure operating system in the world (1 remote root exploit in 7 years,
compared with Linux: many). NetBSD, the most portable operating system
in the world: they say if NetBSD doesn't run on it, and it's capable of
computation, it will soon. In fact, the motto of NetBSD is "Of course it
runs on NetBSD"

They're separate kernels and development spheres, though generally very
similar, so they shouldn't really be lumped together quite as much as
they are, and they certainly shouldn't be dismissed quite as easily as
they are. FreeBSD is a good replacement for Linux for the hardcore.
OpenBSD makes the most fabulous firewalls, as security really isn't a
concern, and if you happen to have an interesting system lying around
that you can't get anything else to run on it, NetBSD will probably run
on it.

While we're on the subject of "Is *BSD good enough to be taken
seriously," one major company has clearly shown that the answer is yes:
Apple. MacOSX is largely based on the *BSDs, especially FreeBSD, and
Apple is now the largest Unix software company in the world. MacOSX is
fabulous, for those who haven't tried it, though it takes some getting
used to if you're coming from Linux.

Oh, and since you mentioned Gentoo: Gentoo brags about emerge: it's what
makes them special in the Linux world. But emerge is just a port of the
portage system of FreeBSD to Linux. Gentoo on Linux is pretty much
FreeBSD a few years behind.

Jeff

* in fact, Debian too is somewhat platform agnostic. Debian is the only
distribution that will actually run the HURD, which is GNU's kernel,
still in experimental stage. Actually, the HURD has been in experimental
stage since before there was a Linux. Linus's announcement of Linux
mentioned that it wouldn't probably be useful for anything because the
HURD would be out "any day now."

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=linus+torvalds+linux+hurd&start=450&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&scoring=d&selm=1991Oct5.071651.9658%40agate.berkeley.edu&rnum=455

There's no reason why Debian couldn't build a Debian GNU/FreeBSD system,
though they haven't yet. 

References:

http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.netbsd.org
http://www.openbsd.org
http://www.netcraft.com
http://www.debian.org
http://www.gnu.org






More information about the PLUG mailing list