[rescue] bsd's

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, April 17, 2002 at 12:04:44 (-0400), Joshua D Boyd wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] bsd's
>
> Personally, I think it would be more interesting to compare those 3 against
> BSDi, xMach, 4.4BSD, 4.4lites, etc.

There's no real comparison possible between {Free,Open,Net}BSD and the
4.4BSD-Lite release -- the former are all more or less direct
derrivatives of the latter, at least in their current form, by way of
386BSD (which was initially BSD-Net/2, which begat NetBSD, which sort of
spawned FreeBSD and later forked OpenBSD).  (each of Net and Free
imported the 4.4BSD-Lite2 changes in slightly different ways and at
slightly different times, since of course it came along well after their
intiial releases)

The BSD-Net and BSD-Lite releases are incomplete in any case, so
impossible to compare with any running system except as source code.
You might want to look up Bill Jolitz's articles in DDJ back issues to
find out what it took to turn the freely available bits of BSD into a
running system.  The rest though is, as they say, history!  ;-)

if you want a good detailed history of all things Unix see the following:

	http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/unix/

4.4BSD itself, which is now finally freely available (Thanks Caldera!)

Personally I would say what's in NetBSD-current is now so much better
and beyond good old 4.4BSD that a comparison is kinda pointless.

Now BSD/OS (by BSDi) is an interesting critter, esp. given that it's a
commercial derrivative of the same BSD-Net/2 plus the 4.4BSD-Lites, but
as done by others from the original UCB CSRG team.

Darwin is another interesting critter to compare the *BSDs against
(including, or maybe especially, BSD/OS).

Personally I really like NetBSD best but I find FreeBSD has some really
good stuff in it (and I use it in production whenever and whereever it
is technically superior to NetBSD), and I occasionally steal code and
fixes from OpenBSD, and I've used BSD/OS happily many times (we still a
1.1 i386 running here at home), and I really like some of the ideas in
Darwin (particularly the Mach Object Format and their shared libraries
and tools for building, tuning, and using them -- the latter of which
should really be ported to the *BSDs because if you're going to suffer
with shared libraries you should at least have the best possible
implementation!).

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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