4 Jun
2022
4 Jun
'22
12:30 a.m.
On Sat, Jun 04, 2022 at 12:16:49AM +0200, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote:
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> writes:
What were the differences? The BSD projects were:
- 386bsd: run by Jolitz, with no input from anyone else
- NetBSD: forked from 386bsd, run by Chris de Metriou as a
cooperative effort between a host of indviduals (me included)
- FreeBSD: forked from NetBSD almost immediately, by a group of
contributors who felt that performance and device support on the Intel
platform was more important than maintaining hardware portability
- OpenBSD: forked from NetBSD after de Raadt established a kind of
record by being kicked off both the NetBSD and FreeBSD mailing lists.
I'm open to contradicting arguments, but I do feel that the BSD platform
was a much better starting point back then, and ought to have won - but
Linux, while inferior, was available and non-threatening.
Dude, I was there. Jolitz used to work for me at Sun, Theo's Sun 4/470
was given to him by me, I know most of the players.
I agree BSD was a better starting point if there was one BSD.
The problem is there was {386,Net,Free,Open,DragonFly}BSD where there
should have just been "BSD". One, not a bunch.
Where do you think Linux would be if there was {A,B,C,D,E,F,G}Linux?
There is one kernel. One and only one. With everyone working on that
one kernel.
If you can't see the difference, I don't know what to tell you. Are you
seriously going to take the position that BSD is better off because
it has all these variants and replicated effort? Because if you are,
this conversation is over, at least from my point of view.
I do not
agree. Linux won because BSD was embroiled in litigation.
Like I said, we experienced that differently. In my opinion, people lean
on the litigation excuse when they don't want to admit that *BSD was not
a good way to do operating system development.