Date: Sat, 30 May 1998 00:27:45 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <dyson@FreeBSD.ORG> To: kutta@leland.Stanford.EDU (John W. Chang) Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: another question... Message-ID: <199805300527.AAA14430@dyson.iquest.net> In-Reply-To: <199805292338.QAA21785@epic5.Stanford.EDU> from "John W. Chang" at "May 29, 98 04:38:19 pm"
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John W. Chang said: > > Are all three BSD flavored OS's worked on by different divisions within > the same organization or are they three distinct, completely separate > groups??? And are any related directly to BSDI??? > > Just curious... I'm a Linux user and just started get interested in > the BSD flavors recently. > > thanks for your help. > Each of the BSD's have different personalities and somewhat overlapping but different optimal applications. FreeBSD is more of a server OS where server (scaled) performance and robustness is a focus, NetBSD is more of an embedded OS with an extreme focus on portability, and OpenBSD is mostly like NetBSD with security as more of a focus. Each can work in each place. For example, if you find that FreeBSD isn't right for you, NetBSD might be. You'll be surprised with how different each one is, but also how similar they are also. If you find that one of the *BSD's doesn't work very well in your application, it is likely that one of the others will work super-well. You can use NetBSD in server apps, with the appropriate tradeoffs, and you can use FreeBSD in embedded apps, with other tradeoffs. You might want to use FreeBSD in X86 embedded situations, while using NetBSD in ARM embedded situations, and each OS is relatively mutually compatible. (One can readily do NetBSD development on a FreeBSD machine, because large builds do go faster, test the code, and download and further test on the final device -- that can be and is being done.) If you want to do a quick port to another architecture, you'll find that NetBSD will be the easist choice. If you want to deploy an X86 (and soon to be Alpha) internet server (at almost any scaled size, on commodity hardware) FreeBSD is likely the best choice. As always: YMMV. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dyson@freebsd.org | it just makes you look stupid, jdyson@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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