Comparing Linux and BSD, Diplomatically

Joe Barr writes "Talk about a red-button issue. How do you compare Linux and the BSDs and keep the debate from turning into a friendly-fire flame-fest nightmare between bigots on both sides of the line? Linus Torvalds once handled a similar situation by wearing a BSD beanie at USENIX while delivering a Linux talk. Now he tries it again in this interview on NewsForge ."

Short Summary

[Hungus]

To summarrize Linus :
1)They are different don't try to compare them.
2)I like Linux better because it agrees with me.
3) Don't ask me what I wan't in Linux (kernal) from BSD (kernal) because I don't use BSD.

Basically it was a whole bunch of nothing

troll much?

[ignorant_newbie]

wow. where shall i start?

Linux' native file system, EXT2FS,

um... i believe you're about 5 years behind the ball here. all major distros have shipped with ext3 or reiserfs as their default for at least that long.

According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage.

um... no. reiser 4 is in beta. reiser 3 has been production ready for years. so, basically, you're just cutting and pasting random unsupported ( when not just blatantly false ) trolls hoping for a response.

Re:Not About To Be Baited

[geomon]

To the Moderator who modded this post "Flamebait":

The Solaris comment was a 'joke'. Humor is often times expressed on Slashdot in a manner that doesn't begin with the words "Two nuns walk into a bar....".

But I have a considerable fan club developing around my posts and have a few stalkers who are always itching to mod my posts down. Perhaps you aren't humorless afterall, but are just angry at someone you've never met.

Sounds strange when it is put that way, doesn't it?

Not quite.

[Some Random Username]

Its very easy on openbsd, and I seriously doubt its much harder on freebsd. You have to download the distfiles manually because of Sun's stupid license, but then you just type "make install".

And of course, some company not making software for BSD is not a limitation of BSD. BSD is entirely capable of running the software, Sun just doesn't feel like releasing a BSD version.

Re:Linus doesn't know much of anything about BSD.

[IceAgeComing]

"Linux has a much wider audience, in many ways. That ranges from supporting much wider hardware (both in the driver sense and in the architecture sense) to actual uses."

Sorry, NetBSD runs on more hardware that linux does..

I'd like to see a Venn diagram of the hardware supported by just BSD, just linux, and both. I imagine that if you gave each piece of hardware a weight by the number of people using that hardware, most of the weight would be in the middle of the diagram (i.e. both linux and BSD support it).

Also note that in the same setence, he was comparing the variety of applications supported by BSD vs. linux.

Re:Easy.

[halber_mensch]

Purchase 1x Tux Plushie, 1x Daemon Plushie, fill them both with audio tapes of associated OS zealot's verbal spew, put them down and press play. Whichever one's batteries run out first wins the debate.

Shouldn't the one that runs out of juice first lose?

That's so typical! Leave it to the Linux users to redefine success in their own benefit...

;)

Re:Linus doesn't know much of anything about BSD.

[quinto2000]

Sorry, NetBSD runs on more hardware that linux does

How do you figure that? Maybe it used to be true, and it is certainly one of NetBSD's goals, but it's simply not true that NetBSD runs on more systems than Linux. NetBSD gives this impression by listing multiple "ports" for a single CPU architecture.

In fact, NetBSD supports 17 different types of CPUs [netbsd.org], some of which are just variations of the other CPUs. It's difficult to find a complete list, but Linux supports at least 22 different system architectures according to this article [ibm.com], and many more of them are useful than the NetBSD ports. Not to mention the much wider variety of peripherals and interface cards that Linux supports than any of the BSDs support.

I can't think of *anything* that linux can do and BSD can't, much less "many" things.

You're living in a different reality than the rest of us, friend. There are many, many user applications out there that work only on Linux, some of which will never be ported to BSD because they are commercial products. Like Maya, for instance, the software that is used for most computer animation today. Even some open source software runs so poorly on BSD that it's not worth using -- like MySQL. The fact is that even if these problems are mostly because of Linux's greater popularity and not technical, Linux is much better as a general purpose OS.

Re:Short Summary

[SirSlud]

Well, obviously, the 'right' tool is a subjective term to begin with, so theoretically, the 'right' tool would take vendor lock-in, political ideals, et al into account.

Re:bothersome

[(startx)]

If he looks at BSD internals, anything he comes up with relation to those internals might be considered derivative works and would need to be BSD licensed.

I was going to mod you down since I've got the points, but there isn't an "Incorrect, -1" moderation.

The BSD license is about as liberal as it gets, basically saying "Do what you want with the code but leave my copyright notice." This includes sticking the BSD code into GPL'd code, XYZ'd code, or even closed, proprietary code.

GPL is the license that says what is open must stay open, and even with that, only if you copy the actual code. "Ideas" are not protected by copyright, just expression. Protecting designs and more recently ideas is what patent law is for.

Re:my black t-shirt can beat up your black t-shirt

[DarkSkiesAhead]

Personally, I find it hilarious that there's a standard anarchy symbol....

The hilarity can be explained by the following reasons:

1. You have absolutely no clue what anarchy means in a political sense.

You are probably one of these people who imagine crazed lunatics running around with cartoon-style bombs when you think of anarchists. In fact, anarchy (as a political term) is defined quite simply: absence of authority. Generally, I would describe it as a system of living without government or the enforced hierarchy which accompanies such government. You may not think this is practical or reasonable (fine, I agree) but don't ignorantly define anarchy as "chaos". If anarchists simply wanted chaos, they would call their movement chaotics or something.

The ideal of anarchy is a system voluntarily accepted by all without forcing it's ideas on anyone. Society would operate by a system which no one person or group controls, but everyone agrees to. By standards everyone follows, with no need to enforce them. Metaphorically, the best symbol for anarchy would be one that all anarchists adopted, but was not dictated or owned by any one of them in particular. Thus, we find that the symbol is actually quite appropriate, contrary to your "hilarious" view of it.

Solaris is best at big iron

[Bishop]

Solaris has fault tollerance features that aren't found in Linux. Solaris has support for isolating failing hardware and hotswaping everything includeing cpu boards. Big IBM, and SGI/Cray iron support this as well. To be fair most Linux developers don't have access to a Sun E10k. So it is understandable if they don't fully support it. Solaris zones are nice and currently better then Linux/Xen, and much better then usermode linux or VMware. On the userland side Solaris has excellent nis/nfs support that I have yet to find in any Linux distro.

However Solaris is big, stubborn, and ugly. I would rather admin three machines each with a different Linux distro then a single Solaris box.

Linux has other strenghts, but on big servers Solaris is best.

Re:bothersome

[Webmonger]

Poppycock. You do have to license derived works under BSD, it's just that the BSD requirements are minimal (Reproduce this copyright statement and disclaimer, and don't use us in your advertising), and you can add additional terms, such as the GPL.

Re:Linus doesn't know much of anything about BSD.

[Azog]

You can't think of anything else besides large SMP systems that Linux does and NetBSD doesn't? Come on, you aren't trying very hard. Just off the top of my head, Linux has:

- Newbie-friendly installers with lots of really nice up to date free software (Ubuntu, FC4, etc.)
- Lots of custom distributions for specialized purposes, live CDs, etc.
- Accelerated 3D graphics with manufacturer-supported drivers.
- Support contracts available from Oracle and other large players.
- Hyperthreading support in scheduler.
- Kernel event system (dbus, hal, hotplug, etc)
- Device drivers for far more devices.
- Security levels beyond standard POSIX (NSA-designed SELinux framework, etc.)
- Really good, mature, journalling file systems.
- ... lots more, really.

Sure, NetBSD runs on more hardware. This is good if you want to create an embedded system with some obscure microcontroller.

But nobody choosing an operating system actually cares how many microprocessors are supported. They just care if their cpu is supported. And for 99.99% of the world, with linux, it is.

Re:bothersome

[sflory]

Unless it's the old bsd license it's not an issue. The old BSD license had an issue with the GPL, but it's not used much any more.

Compare orginal, and modifiedBSD licenses.
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/license-list .html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses [fsf.org] http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/license-list .html#GPLCompatibleLicenses [fsf.org]

Re:Not quite.

[laffer1]

Java 1.5 is alpha quality last i checked on FreeBSD. The patchset isn't done yet. AMD64 support is also new in the 1.5 build. That is a known problem.

In a ia32 install, you just install linux sun jdk14 port and then download like two or three files from sun plus the patch set and put them in /usr/ports/distfiles

Then just do make, make install. After an hour or two it should be done (somewhat recent hardware). I use native java in production with Tomcat 5.5 right now. It works well.

In the mean time, you could install the 32 bit version of FreeBSD on the AMD64 to get java support. It sucks, but its a start. Sun's the reason Apple has to make their own JVM and we get into headaches with compatibility.. write once run anywhere my ass.

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