Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 22nd Feb 2010 09:53 UTC, submitted by irbis
Why was it not FreeBSD but Linux that became the most popular open source Unix-like operating system? Richard Hillesley traces the history of FreeBSD and examines how FreeBSD, and Linux, their different cultures and preferred licenses affected the open source world. "The BSD hackers have an aphorism that speaks some truths, which says: 'BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.' This aphorism speaks of a difference in the cultures that is greater than the words contained within it."
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Member since:2005-11-18
I've always preferred BSD to Linux, at least by a little bit, but generally end up using Linux in real deployments.
I agree to some extend. Especially on the desktop. I used NetBSD on my workstation for many years, and was a NetBSD developer. I quit at some point, because it became very hard to keep doing useful work.
For servers, at least if you do not use very high-end hardware, BSD works just as fine. On the desktop I have moved from Linux to OS X now, which is mostly BSD (at least from an API/userland perspective).
As a developer, I also like the stable target that is libc, vs. the constantly moving target that is glibc.
I never really bumped into problems with glibc itself. More problematic is the sheer numer of extensions in GNU software, that are commonly used. Nowadays I try to compile everything regularly with two compilers (g++/Visual C++) and three standard libraries (glibc/libstdc++, BSD libc/libstdc++, and whatever Microsoft provides).
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2008-12-26
Member since:
2009-06-18
I've always preferred BSD to Linux, at least by a little bit, but generally end up using Linux in real deployments. CentOS or RHEL are perceived as lower risk--and may in fact be lower risk, since there are more people that understand them and their ways. Sometimes you've got to pick your battles.
Yahoo has done well with BSD, though.
I use BSD at my home office to good effect, and I made a VMWare spam-filtering appliance that was BSD-based that got a whole bunch of downloads through VMWare. Still use it myself.
As a developer, I also like the stable target that is libc, vs. the constantly moving target that is glibc.
*Edit it add last sentence.*
Edited 2010-02-22 16:14 UTC