[geeks] SCO sues IBM (pure UNIX *BSD)

[Jochen Kunz]

On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 04:49:08AM -0500, Kevin wrote:

> "Joshua D. Boyd" <jdboyd at celestrion.celestrion.net>
> wrote:
> > In my opinion, the most pure unix is NetBSD.  I mean,
> > it descends
> > directly from the old BSD unix distribution
> More so than FreeBSD?  I'm not debating, i'm asking. 
Well, hmm. All BSD systems (Free, Net, Open, BSD/OS (and Darwin)) are 
derived from the same 4.4BSD codebase. [1]
What makes NetBSD to "the most pure unix" is hard to describe. It is
small and very puristic. It has everything that a unix must have, 
but no additional "features". E.g. no bash and no perl. If you want
this you have to add it via the pkgsrc system, it is not in the base
system. NetBSD has a very clean and orthogonal design. Everything 
"feels" very "unixish". I call NetBSD my personal unix reference
implementation.
The latest FreeBSD I used heavily was 2.2.8, long gone. It seams 
that the FreeBSD people take things more "pragmatic" like the NetBSD 
developers. E.g. FreeBSD replaced csh with tcsh. Somthing that
would never happen with NetBSD. But it is still much more unix than
every Linux distribution. (IMHO)
I never worked with OpenBSD, so I can't talk about this. 

[1] This is not quite exact. The first FreeBSD and NetBSD versions 
where based on 4.3BSD NET/2. But due to legal constrains they imported 
4.4BSD Lite later and pulled over what they had added to the 4.3BSD 
NET/2 codebase. You remember that AT&T lawsuit?
-- 



tsch|_,
          Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz