Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 14:18:05 -0400 From: kriston@ibm.net (Kriston J. Rehberg) To: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSD vs Linux Message-ID: <7918-Wed13May1998141805-0400-kriston@ibm.net> In-Reply-To: <199805130010240788.00CCE456@mailgate.execpc.com> References: <199805130010240788.00CCE456@mailgate.execpc.com>
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I believe part of the reason that Linux is more advocated than FreeBSD is that Linux, and the software distributed with it, is under GPL while FreeBSD is under the Berkeley license. Furthermore, most people still remember the fight that AT&T had with Berkeley that, whether you want to believe it or now, indirectly resulted in the cancellation of the BSD project and the release of the "lite" version. That stigma gives people the impression that BSD is not entirely free while the Linux distributions are. Since you spoke of commercial distributions, have you actually seen the horrendous prices that BSDI charges for licenses? They are a very far cry from the $29.95 that the Linux distributions cost (and the $39.95 that the FreeBSD disks cost). Besides the fact that visiting www.bsdi.com gives you this advertisement for nothing but "spam filter" and "internet appliance" boxes. And the fact that all of the email contacts on the pages are for reseller relations and nothing about technical support. Tech support, if you can find the page, actually requires a support contract. BSDI just seems so out of reach it's really quite remarkable. They can learn a lot from Debian Linux's free license and modest support contract fees, even Debian's support of an open, public support forum. But back to the FreeBSD advocacy issue. If it were not called "FreeBSD" or "OpenBSD" or even "NetBSD" I, as a longtime Unix user, would have thought that AnythingBSD was still under the restrictive AT&T license that BSD 4.3 and earlier suffered from. Indeed, I am still not sure (after reading all the background on the *BSD releases) which of the "big three" BSD releases came directly out of BSD4.4-Lite and which releases came from a hacked-apart BSD 4.3 made to resemble an "unencumbered" BSD 4.4-Lite without actually having arisen directly from 4.4-Lite itself. Maybe it's best that FreeBSD is called FreeBSD, but maybe for the wrong reasons -- for people like me who still remember the AT&T vs. BSD dispute and have instead advocated SVR4-alikes such as Linux which are based on free, open software. Kris -- Kriston J. Rehberg AOL: Kriston http://kriston.net/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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