VanLUG Email Archive
> BSD doesn't have a zillion different distributions? That's a good one!
> BSD has a zillion different organizations with many distributions each!
>
> Let's see, there is OpenBS, Net BSD, FreeBSD, BSD/OS... Then there
> are operating systems that were derived from BSD code like SunOS,
> ancient HP-UX, ...
Currently there are three free variants of BSD out there: FreeBSD,
NetBSD and OpenBSD. How many Linux distributions are there? Compare
the two numbers. The Linux one is bigger. End of story.
If you insist on counting commerical OSes as well, BSDI is still
alive, but the old HP/UX and SunOS are both dead. But then, are
you going to count Solaris and new HP/UX in with the Linux camp
because they're all System-V-like?
> > And, as I've mentioned before, the fragmentation caused by the
> > number of Linux distributions out there causes its own problems.
> > You can take a binary compiled for NetBSD 1.0 and run it on any
> > NetBSD system out there, so long as it's not been mucked up too
>
> What about running them on BSD/OS? Or OpenBSD?
It depends on them. Obviously the NetBSD folks can't guarantee
backward compatability on other operating systems. But as far as
I know, they're pretty similar in terms of supporting backward
compatability.
It's certainly not become such a problem that we have to set up a
whole new organisation just to help deal with it, as the Linux
crowd has had to.
> This is understandable; libc is under transition right now.
Yes. It's been `under transition' for four years now.
> What steps are the various BSD sects taking toward Unix98 compliance?
All the BSDs have representatives on the committees, as far as I
can tell. Unix98 is hardly a panacea, though since it covers only
one CPU family (i386) and one word size (32 bits) last I checked.
> > That's ok. I'm not asking you to be interested in it. I'm just
> > responding to yet another propagation of the myth that BSD is more
> > `closed' than Linux.
>
> You mean there aren't any proprietary operating systems that are based on
> BSD code?
Yes, there are. How does this make the BSD source base less open?
I'd bet that there are changes to Linux kernels out there that are
not distributed as well.
cjs
Curt Sampson
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