Subject: Re: Document: What's the difference between Linux and BSD?
To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 04/27/2000 10:35:34
Greg Lehey said on Apr 27, 2000 at 13:17:38:
> I'm writing a "white paper" to describe BSD to people who know Linux.
> You can find it at http://www.lemis.com/bsdpaper.html.
>
> I'd like feedback on the following aspects:
>
> 1. Have I forgotten something?
> 2. Is it accurate?
> 3. Is it fair?
Section "Why isn't BSD better known?"
product contained AT&T copyrighted code. The case was settled out
of court in 1994, but the spectre of the legislation continues to
^^^^^^^^^^^
haunt people. As recently as March 2000 an article published on
Should be "litigation", I imagine.
Some additions on "why use BSD instead of linux":
* Linux users who're buggered by the difficulty of cleanly upgrading
their system (a major kernel upgrade or C library upgrade may require
upgrades to 10 or 20 other components, and may in addition break some
packages) may like the ease of BSD's "cvs/cvsup / make world" way of
upgrading, and the greater continuity in major upgrades (eg FreeBSD
3.x -> 4.x was I believe a fairly smooth change, though I haven't done
it yet, but glibc 2.0 -> 2.1 on linux breaks a lot of stuff, and
libc5 -> glibc 2.0 broke even more).
* FreeBSD's ports collection is also a major plus point, though I've
heard that Debian's pkg system is comparably good and there are
now some tools for auto-tracking RPM dependencies too.
* FreeBSD's binary compatibility with linux. I can run
linux-Netscape 6 and the Mozilla linux builds on FreeBSD, and they
work fine, but I can't run them on our linux machines because I
haven't worked up the courage to upgrade to glibc 2.1 yet.
* OpenBSD's reputation for security, for security-critical situations
or for the paranoid.
On the whole, a very nice article which boosts the BSD's without
FUDding linux or sounding patronising towards it the way so many
BSD users like to.
Rahul.