“There are many distributions of BSD, the most popular of which are OpenBSD, and BSD/OS. Similar to Linux, BSD is based on open source code and widely used for Web hosting. Often compared to Linux, noncommercial BSD operating systems generally have more liberal open source licenses, 10 years’ more history, and many BSD proponents credit these operating systems with greater reliability and efficiency than Linux. But while Linux garners all the industry attention and sales, BSD is hidden from the spotlight.” Someone could argue that FreeBSD is the most popular BSD these days, but in any case, you can read the article at ZDNet.
BSD operating systems: A ZDNet Perspective
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I’d love to play games on my CLI and SSH-session. How about strip poker?
Oh I forgot, the only thing computers are good for is gaming… Come on now, lets get the facts straight, or at least read the article.
as Eugenia said, its arguable that freebsd is the more popular. well, id say that openbsd and bsd/os are the _least_ popular, with freebsd and netbsd both having many more users. im not sure how many users OS X has, but i wouldnt be surprised if it was more than all the other bsds combined. i suppose that it could be argued that num_of_users != popularity
also, netbsd was not spun off of freebsd, both projects started off independently of the other, not even knowing of the other projects existence in the beginning.
“[Apple] launched a commitment to the open-source movement when it made several components from Mac OS X Server available to the open source community—these include the Darwin core, the Mach kernel, the Apache Web server, and other technologies.”
Hmmm… wasn’t Apache already released by the Apache community? And wasn’t the Mach kernel already available? The only thing I see here that Apple released is Darwin.
G
…it’s ZDNet. I’m surprised they managed to spell ‘BSD’ properly.
Catharsis,
LMAO I almost forgot. Silly me.
G
This article seemed to be a little on the foggy side. From the article:
…Compared to Linux, BSD does not have the massive number of commercial and open-source applications and utilities, although BSD does support around 6,000 ported open source packages that are available to users as an option at the time they install BSD…
Really? Which BSD would that be? I think here the author confused FreeBSD with BSD. I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that each BSD used a different package/ports system that may be somewhat similar in design but different in implementation.
It was also suprising that they did not mention (or maybe I missed it) that FreeBSD, NetBSD, et all use different kernels, which is one of the main differences between flavors of BSD and distros of Linux.
Also, from the article:
…However, while Linux has overtaken BSD recently in terms of performance tests, BSD users are still enthusiastic…
I wonder what benchmark/tests the author is referring to? This may or may not be true (not that it really matters) but it would be nice to know what he is referring to. I remember an article a little while ago about FreeBSD performance vs. Linux performance:
(http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1794/byt20011107s0001/1112_moshe.ht…)
but I am not sure how reliable of a benchmark was used for that test, not to mention that this is Linux vs. FreeBSD and NOT Linux vs. BSD.
Adam, the author was definitely not an OS expert. The multi-CD *BSD sets do come with thousands of open source packages but for most users that is just window dressing. The different BSD systems do use different package systems but then again not all Linux distros use RPM. At this point from the users point of view there are more similarities than differences between the various *BSD’s and Linux distro’s. Linux had the definite edge with respect to commercial apps but FreeBSD can run these apps in Linux emulation mode. While the different BSD’s have slightly different kernels the process of rebuilding them is all the same and is scarcely different than it has been in BSD UNIX for over 15 years. Most of the recent benchmarks I’ve seen have put Linux slightly ahead of FreeBSD but on the other hand when you look at Netcraft’s lists of sites with the longest average uptime most of these sites are on BSD hosts.
Yes, I think I forgot that this was written (not by a BSD expert) for a nontechnical-level audience. Perhaps including too much would make the intended audience’s eyes roll over with technobabble. I do think the comments about the lack of market hype (and the resulting slowness of acceptance in the corporate world) were interesting, though.