Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 00:18:52 -0400 From: Mark Mayo <mark@vmunix.com> To: esr@thyrsus.com Cc: Wes Peters <wpeters@xylan.com>, "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@narnia.plutotech.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Open Source Products Message-ID: <19980414001852.21043@vmunix.com> In-Reply-To: <19980413232933.11258@snark.thyrsus.com>; from Eric S. Raymond on Mon, Apr 13, 1998 at 11:29:33PM -0400 References: <199804131719.LAA21122@narnia.plutotech.com> <35326353.4E30451B@xylan.com> <19980413201541.65522@snark.thyrsus.com> <3532AD36.2968F8B6@xylan.com> <19980413215647.37918@snark.thyrsus.com> <19980413231307.01919@vmunix.com> <19980413232933.11258@snark.thyrsus.com>
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On Mon, Apr 13, 1998 at 11:29:33PM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > Sigh. I *told* you not to bother getting indignant at me. I very > much want what you're saying to be true, but you're doing a poor job > of convincing me so far. I'm no rabid Linux partisan (I learned my > Unix chops under 4.1BSD back in VAX days) and ad-hominem attacks only > lead me to suspect that your objective case is weak. Sorry. I didn't mean to craft an attack against you, but statements like "the BSD crowd is split into squabbling spinoff-group-of-the-week factions" get me all riled up. :-) Obviously, the only way you can truly be convinced of the openess between the BSDs is to look at the source and see the code-sharing in action. I've never personally seen any bitter disputes between the BSD camps; actually quite the opposite. The developers seems to be very friendly and respect each other. Of course, I'm young and therefore new to the BSD world, and things may very well have been different in the past, but I simply see no evidence of it today. The three "free" BSDs have distinct goals, and they fill their respective niches very well, and complement each other perfectly, IMHO. :-) A gross generalization might be to day that FreeBSD has always been focused on performance on the x86 platform (although that is changing) and simply making things work so people can get work done. NetBSD seems to be very focused on platform independance, and "doing things right" even if it means they sometimes don't get done at all. OpenBSD has, from the start, been very security minded. All 3 pick up things from each other, and benefit from each others existance. The seperation is a way of letting interested parties work on projects that best suit their skills, and work in environments that best suit their needs. I agree that a "Unified BSD" would possibly have better luck at marketing itself, but the fact remains that the current setup allows for incredible technical innovation - and that's a quality that very few people developing or using a BSD would be willing to loose. -Mark > -- > <a href="http://sagan.earthspace.net/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a> > > There's a truism that the road to Hell is often paved with good intentions. > The corollary is that evil is best known not by its motives but by its > *methods*. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Mayo mark@vmunix.com RingZero Comp. http://www.vmunix.com/mark finger mark@vmunix.com for my PGP key and GCS code ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The problem is how do you build tools that understand your programs at a deeper semantic level." - James Gosling To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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