Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 10:35:34 +0530 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: FreeBSD advocacy list <FreeBSD-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG>, netbsd-advocacy@NetBSD.ORG, OpenBSD-advocacy@OpenBSD.org Subject: Re: Document: What's the difference between Linux and BSD? Message-ID: <20000427103533.B3473@physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <20000427131738.G55780@freebie.lemis.com>; from grog@lemis.com on Thu, Apr 27, 2000 at 01:17:38PM %2B0930 References: <20000427131738.G55780@freebie.lemis.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20000427103533.B3473>